greetings,

        Hello everyone, my name is Andy, I work as a full
time computer teacher and my time has been spent teaching
various courses to all sorts of people and corporate clients.

        I have always liked electronics and I even took many
electronic courses in my studies, but it was a 1 year intensive
and frankly you didn't have time to get into it.. all you had was
jump from one module to another and learn as much as you can
for the exam, then go to the next module..

        so in other words, I know a lot of bits and pieces of
electronics. Although I have lots of experience running an SMT
assembly line, Pick and Place machines, Paste machines
etc.. I used to program and run various machines and I did
pre-oven inspection and quality control. I did tons of soldering
and even hand soldered surface mount circuits.

        So putting stuff together isn't a problem, but I
lack very basic electronic theory knowledge. I can read
schematics and put stuff together but I have never designed
anything myself.

        I have been purchasing many electronics books
and books on robotics and PICs. My current goal may be
ultra simple, but I need help.

        I would like to build a small circuit that would
be similar to a BASIC stamp 1. Something which I can
connect to a 9v battery and then program in ASM to
turn 8 different LEDs on and off (or anything really).

        I know Don McKenzie answered my original
post in comp.robotics.misc with a link to his dt203.
But I don't want something I have to order, I want something
I can build on a proto board and which has ONLY what I
asked for above. Just a very simple circuit that I can plug
my programmed PIC16f84 into and then press a push
button switch to run the program press again to reset.

Thats all. My goal with this is simply to be able to have
the circuit.. then concentrate on my assembly programming
and seeing what I can do with those basic i/o lines.
I feel that once I have played around with it long enough,
the rest will come very easy. I just need this basic circuit
to get me started.

I've roamed over 100 PIC links this week and haven't
found anything this simple. I am thinking of purchasing
the book  Easy Pic'n, which seems to start from the
lowest possible point (which is where I am) and apparently
contains such a circuit.

I would like to know if anyone here can point me to a
circuit like this so I can avoid having to order a 50$CA
book which will take a few weeks to arrive.

Thanks for your time and sorry about the long post.

Andy