So it's decided...

After talking it over with the team, we will be going full force with the Arduino boards. We already have one in from Sparkfun.com

Check it out:

Arduino !?!?!?

Luckily we are still very early in our project that we can make drastic changes. Although we have already programmed our 2 Freescale micro-controllers to communicate wirelessly, we may look into switching to the ATmega328 micro-controller housed on the Arduino Duemilanove. The Freescale MCU may have more functions, pins, and faster speeds, but our project does not require a lot out of the MC to begin with. The Arduino has a large (largest?) following in small to large electronics projects with much support from fellow engineers and developers. After viewing the language (based on C++) that the Arduino uses, it seems very user friendly and very easy to learn. In contrast we were using straight forward C++ on the Freescale. There are many prebuilt libraries that we can use for the Arduino that we can make our programming a lot easier to do.