Steve,

The concept of what I am doing is this:

I have two switches. One that is normally open and then other that is normally closed. They are connected together on the same loop with a 1K resistor that allows me to indicate an open loop and a shorted loop. The open loop indication shows a green led and the shorted loop shows a red led. The red overrides the green as the red is more important in this situation.

When the shorted condition occurs, the beeper output goes out on a bus for 1 second which is picked up by the master board that turns on a pulsing beeper until someone silences it by pressing the silence button. The green led does nothing more than indicate that the condition exists.

What I am trying to do now is create a serial output that would be picked up by the master board which would compare the message to a lookup table and then send the data to a serial printer along with the date and time of the event.

I hope this helps.

Thanks.

BobK.