I like having multiple projects going. While I've been working on other things the past few days, I've had a chance to reflect a little on The Public Radio's current configuration. Zach has been doing other things too, but we've had a few chances to reconvene and have assembled a short, rough wishlist:

Programmable by AVRISP. This means breaking out 6 additional pins on the Pro Mini and adding a 6-pin programming header. Doing so will allow us to remove the bootloader, shortening startup time and pushing us towards an eventual transition to ATTiny.
Cut parts where possible. The one place this is really possible is on the screw terminals, where we can replace two 2-terminal parts with one 4-terminal part. That'll save up to $.09 per board - not exactly champagne-and-caviar money, but it's something.

The effect of just these two changes means laying out basically the whole board again. The 4-terminal screw block will screw up my whole amp & voltage regulator layout - basically the whole left side of the board. And the programming header (which I'll probably put in the bottom left) will require a few traces crossing the board up/down - likely causing trouble for some of the FM chip circuit.

Tonight I began playing with this a bit, though I didn't get far:

The other thing I'd really like to do is plop a DIP package ATTiny on here somewhere, but there'll be a pretty significant redesign associated with that too, plus a learning curve re: getting off of Arduino, and all in all I think I should just wait until v1.3.

I'm hoping to get a big chunk of this work done early next week, as it's continuing to slip a bit. Still, we're definitely getting closer to our end goal - and learning a ton in the process.