GPIO Pin Problems

That's exactly what I'm trying to do, yes, as a test mechanism to establish control over input and output. Ultimately two output pins will be used to trigger the range finder and drive a PWM module, and one input pin will be needed for the return data from the range finder. I've never tried bidirectional pins so thank you for the suggestion. What do you suggest using as a mechanism to control the port direction? Some kind of multiplexer?

Also, if anyone knows how I can solve the original problem of not being able to get standard inputs and outputs to work together on the expansion header that's still an option as well. I'm still not sure why it's not working to do that. I think I've seen people do that with these ports in VHDL and Verilog so I'm wondering if the compiler is just taking care of something behind the scenes. Guess that's the advantage to learning those languages. :-)