[Kevin Sevcik]

I don't think there's anyone on CD who hasn't done something silly can ended up frying/melting/exploding something before. If they haven't, they probably haven't done much interesting stuff. Just don't make a habit of it, because it gets expensive.

If you had the sabertooth working with the futaba to move the tetrix motor, then the S1 and S2 control signals for the sabertooth should be the same as the control signals for any of the other FRc motor controllers. So yes, you can control the Sabertooth through the RoboRIO. To do so, connect the white wire of a standard PWM to S1 or S2 and the black wire to 0V. Leave the red wire unconnected, but tape it up so it doesn't short the roboRIO to something else. Then plug the female end of the PWM into the RoboRIO just like any other motor controller.

Yes, you can power the Futaba off the 0V and 5V connections on the Sabertooth. They say you can use up to 4 standard servos if you do that, so you should be good.

Also, it used to be standard practice to run entire VEX robots off 6 AA batteries, so running one servo off a handful of batteries isn't a big deal.