Exellent. This is moving along nicley now.

Good idea on the trim pot for time out, I like it...

So the only decision now is what pic to use and the pin out? It looks like im not going to use the short circuit protection so the the tripple 3 input AND gate is wasted in this circuit.

Are there enough pins on the pic to implment the 1/2 step boost, or will it make the code difficult?

Last question. dose this need a crystal or can it be linked to the sync pin on the L297 for external clock?