hey guys, heh i haven't posted back in a while, but figured i'd go back and give you guys an update.

today i spent about 3 hours in the senior design lab, and i was finally able get some readings off of the board. I ended up using port 2, because it has a lot of various functions on the board. In fact, i ended up taking the voltage at some of the various "solder gout" points on the board... ick.

anyways, i'd like to thank all of you for the help in getting me started. Basically to solve my problem i made sure to INCLUDE that generic startup.a51 file generated by keil. In order to do a lot of the testing i used the debugger/simulator in keil... man that thing works great, i can't wait until we get the full edition. But once it seemed to be working on that, i moved it over to the actual chip, and it worked.

I still have one question... in some of the example code i found on keil's website, they set the ports to be inputs by initially writing 0xFF to them. I know all the ports (i think) start out as 0xFF, so since their latches... this shouldn't change anything should it? i'm still not quite sure about how all that directional setting goes on the 4 various ports that are available. I wasn't really able to find anything about it in a quick skim over "the bible"

In my code i initially write 0x00 to port 2 just to initally set it low, then i have a delay loop, and set it to 0xFF, then repeat forever, kind of like the code i had posted before. I also took out the Reg_c51.h and made my own port definitions in the same file.

anyways, thanks again for all the help/suggestions, i'm sure you'll see me back on here. Next we're tackling writing an LCD driver, that shouldn't be too hard. I know there are more than enough posts on here about that, so i should be able to figure it out.