[Geek 2.0]

My current plan is to use ALL of the pins on the Cypress for bitbanging. I wrote my own protocol. I would have 8 digital inputs, 4 digital outputs, a pin for the interrupt on the board it's talking to (so it knows when there's new data), and some other pins for addressing and such. Essentially, the DS sends new data and an address, flips the interrupt, and then the other system reads it. It seems roundabout, I know, but the way the system is designed, it gives us a lot of advantages, such as virtually unlimited data pins, reusability (since we write the protocol, FIRST's design changes don't affect it), a modular design (modules w/ buttons, pots, etc. send data to the master over I2C, which in turn sends it to the DS), and a few other small things on top of that. At 50Hz (I would assume the packets send/receive data for ALL the pins at 50Hz) we're perfectly fine. that gives us 50 B/s, which is more than enough. SPI is a bottleneck really.

So it seems like it should be able to handle it.