to Atlanta: shortly after posting the skeleton sketch i noticed the second page of the posts and seen yours, great advice and i will work on it. but my original problem was getting the rtc, keypad display, and mega 2560 to talk together. so if you know a page where it shows how to do that, i might be able to take control from there, and i won't need to bother the forum any more except for showing the final product off. lol