Hi Steve,
Bull’s eye, I DO have to start working with serial first,I have to at least be able to communicate with my MCU don’t I ? Yeah I found most of the code pieces I need in the Code Library of our web site thankyou. And No! I will use opto coupler and the wonderful Schmidd trigger to recondition the bits if I ever succed in getting them out of the port pins.I’ll couple it to the Fanuc via bi directional transceiver. But that-Switch on and off LED's across the reader holes- was a good joke indeed :-)