Thanks for all of the advice. I'll try this out sometime in the next week. I might not be able to get to it for a couple days because we're trying to reserve this next week for drive practice.
One of our mentors expressed concern that wiring the DI/O to the red/blue/green wires of the team flasher cable might fry a circuit in the RC. He said this would be even worse if the team flasher ports on the RC used a different ground than the DI/O ports.
We haven't ever used the DI/O ports as outputs before so correct me if I'm wrong, but when you turn a DI/O output "on", you're applying +5V to the signal pin, correct? Does anyone know if connecting this to the team color lights (the red/blue/green wires) will draw more than the 7mA max for those pins as specified here?:
http://www.ifirobotics.com/rc.shtml#Specifications
If not then I plan to hook a bench supply to the orange/black wires to provide 12V, and use the meter on a second power supply to see how much current is drawn while using it to apply +5v to the red/green/blue wires.
Will this work? I haven't had any real experience working with electronics, so I'm not sure if I'm missing something here.