That was a very interesting read! The type of thing I could see myself doing over 40 years ago when once I'd come up with a neat idea and either did preliminary coding or hardware design suggesting it would work I'd jump right into it and find optimistic 1 month project timelines stretching to 6+ months. My approach now would be to just use a logic analyzer or a number of Propeller boards to sample all of the lines from ROS as very sedate clock speed that the 5100 uses. Still, this has applications beyond original goal and could use it to acquire patient lab data from hospital EMR's which are increasingly locked down. Used to be I could export a patients lab results to a text file easily to graph them out vs time or look at correlations between various lab values. Now that's forbidden as one is only allowed to look at them on the screen or use the abysmal graphing functionality which is very poorly coded and makes a PDP-8 doing the same functionality seem like a supercomputer. Thus, one could simply point a cell phone camera at the screen, record the lab results scrolling by and then do OCR on the series of images to create a data file of all of the lab results one is interested in. I've just photographed results on a screen as takes less room than another sheet of paper.