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PICs
The current RCs use PIC16C84s, which are very similar to other Microchip PICs, except that these are programmed with a basic interpreter. This slows them down (normal PICs have an instruction execution time of 200 ns, and operate at about 20 MHz.) Replacing these with another PIC would allow users to program them in assembly, C, Basic, Pascal, C++, and even Java (there are several free compilers available that would take any of these languages and output assembly). It would be a small transition to make (just take the current PIC out of the socket and put in the new one), since they have the same pin-out and form-factor, and would also be the easiest transition for programming. I guess we'll see in a week.
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