It seems a shame to discard all I've done, since it took me so much work, but I did learn from all of it. Again, this is my first foray into the realm of microcontrollers, C, etc.

and now you will make a better one and .... and a year from now, looking at that, you will say to yourself "how could I make such crap".

We all started out that way.

Lesson learned: sometimes you have to "discard what you have done" (I did that a week ago). When you find in the end that one little crummy detail was overlooked in the initial approach, that is the correct action. I congratulate you on taking that step. I have seen soooo much crap that was a result of forcing a bad idea to work just because the originator wanted to prove (s)he was right.

Erik