newbie needs help!!!!

[mister_e]

hi fishingsetx ,
i see what you mean. For now, for your purpose, for your budget why not using Visual Basic to acces to LPT1 port ??? everything will be done as you wish with a minimal investement and time but will need a PC to run it. Depending if you have one PC in extra.

Or in the worst case, you can learn Assembly language of Microchip. With MPLAB (free IDE of microchip) you'll be able to compile your stuff. You can also build your own PIC programmer see this one
http://www.lancos.com/prog.html

or this one
http://www.myke.com/elcheapo.htm

but it support only a few PIC. Maybe some others free stuff can be avalaible on the net too. Have a look. let us know.

good luck.

regards