ok guys, thanks a lot for the suggestions. I still think some of you are confused as to what i have available, and what type of "learning" environment i'm in here.

I'm a 5th year college student at a great engineering school. We do have A LOT of resources at our disposal (oscilliscopes, DMM's, logic analyzers, etc.). The main focus of the embedded program here is on the MC68HC11 Motorola chip, so i have done (or should've done... stupid professors...) pretty much everything you guys have said. We've used the MIT Handyboard (http://www.handyboard.com) in conjunction with the HC11 chip, so i do know a fair amount of wiring up and using LED's, photocells, A/D converters, line trackers, infared sensors, and using oscilloscopes to analyze things.

As far as this project, all seniors need to select a team (so it's me and 3 of my friends) and propose a project. So we are doing all of this COMPLETELY on our own, while meeting with an advisor once a week. The reason i say that we split up into hardware and software teams is this...

for our project we need to create 3 docking stations (one for a car, a stereo, and home use to use with our "mp3 player". The hardware team is taking care of actually designing the hardware configurations for those stations as well as the finalized player. We don't really intend on using the development board as our final player.

as far as the software end, myself and another team member are going to be developing drivers for LCD, DAC, ATA/HDD stuff and what not. This way, when the final design is done, we can implement all of those on the reference design, and not the development board that we're working with now.

Yes we all have SOME part in hardware/software, but when i say hardware and software teams, that just means that we're focusing on that certain aspect of the project. It doesn't really make any sense to have us all creating an LCD driver at once. Plus we only have one board available for use at a time, so we all can't be developing software at the same time.

As far as hyperterminal goes, heh, well first off... everyone at this school is supplied with a laptop computer as part of a technology package. These computers (Compaq Evo N800c) do not come with a serial port... go figure. We do have port replicators available at our disposal however, but sometimes getting them can be a hassle. For some networking and embedded systems classes here, SOME professors (none of mine...) have taught hyperterminal use through the HC11. Right now i think i would spend more time trying to figure out how to get hyper terminal to work, and it wouldn't really benefit the project. I totally agree that it's a great skill to have/use, but right now it just doesn't fit into my time budget, we have weekly deliverables for this project; plus i have 3 other classes going on at the same time.

I did find the 'bible' stuff off of this website and i've been reading for a little bit. Things are starting to make more sense, but i think my main problem is i have this new architechture as well as a HUGE development board that has way too many (as you said) bells and whistles on it. It's just a lot to take in at once.

Today i think i'm going to spend about 6-10 hours (i don't have any classes) really trying to familiarize myself with the architechture and hopefully get something to come off of the board.

One other question, since this will be sort of an "mp3 player", or a "higher level" device... do you guys recommend doing this in embedded C, or assembley. I'm just wondering since all the 'bible' stuff i looked at is in assembley. Personally i would think C would be better, but you guys have more experience than i do.

thanks again for the help n' keep the suggestions coming

Aaron