ah, that's a good point. the 878A had 24bits of "clockable" GPIO. but that'd be if I end up using the 878. if i end up with the zoran jpeg codec and some other video decoder, i'd probably make a separate RS232 capable PIC board and then use the motherboard's serial port to get digital IO. i'm still trying to figure out how to solve the performance issue though. meaning, i'd like to get that 15fps per channel with 4 channels and deliver jpeg to a general purpose CPU for further processing/decisions. thanks, roines Nigel Duckworth wrote: I do some work for a machine vision provider and help them with interfacing cameras, sensors etc. to the digital I/O which is provided on some frame-grabber cards. If you're 'in' at the design stage then some uncommitted digital I/O would be very useful IMHO. The cameras they use have TTL triggers for capturing images and also RS232 for remote configuation by the host PC. Nigel Duckworth Frame grabbers www.imaging.com Cameras www.jai.com --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads