[whytheheckme]

I've always been so fascinated with the possibilities for the OI...

Last year (call me crazy), I tried designing a micro-controller that hooked to the dashboard port, which decoded the SERIAL and put it out to a CPLD, which then put it out to 7-Seg displays and a couple of LED-Matracies. This failed when I ran out of time, and my team told me that it was more important that the robot could move and stuff than have a cool OI (go figure?)..

Now you may be wondering: Why don't you use a laptop with Dashboard?

I wanted to try to develop some hardware to be able to do this instead of relying on a super-over-qualified computer to do the job. If I was able to do it, I was planning on submitting the designs up here so that other people could try it (The whole thing cost under 100 dollars.. Much more affordable then a laptop, let alone extra batteries...)

Anyway, getting back to the topic of this thread, this year I am thinking about running everything through ribbon cable. Essentially having boxes with lots of sockets in them accessible from the outside, and soldering ribbon cable to each pin, home-running it all to a box with a bunch of DIP switches on the outside to set which sockets are currently in use, with 4 DB-15 cables coming out of the box to the OI. This would allow for hookup of almost anything. They I could create adapters for parts that could allow them to simply be placed or removed from the sockets, in essence *Hot Swappable*...

OK, I'm rambling, and if you actually read this whole post I am surprised, but I love this kind of stuff.

Jacob