Hey Arduinocnc,
Yeah it'll be perfect for that, plus any other projects that need two serial ports and a bunch of extra pins.
Our designer uses the ORCAD Pro Software suite, and it doesn't have an Eagle translator - you'd think a 10k commercial application would, but apparently not.
So the plan is to assemble and test, then put the board into the environment it was built for, then decide what to do with the leftovers.
There's also a sister I/O multiplexer board arriving in a couple of weeks. It'll work with any Arduino and has a daisy chain header so you can connect as many boards together as you like using 5 core ribbon cable. Each board adds an extra 16 douts and 16 dins, and has inline resistors so it can plug n play with LEDs and switches "out-of-the-box".
We have a third board in production, which is a refinement of the dCoreDuino including USB, and has the same pin header spacing as an NG, so it will be compatible with Arduino Shields. For general purpose applications, that might be the better of the two to wait for.
We're looking at having 4 ATMEGA168's on that if we can optimize on space without resorting to SMD's - kits aren't as much fun it the parts are too tricky to solder, so we think the added length will be worth it. The width will be the same as an NG, but the board will be slightly longer.
Since we're buying the IC's in bulk, adding another two won't cost much, but the retail price for that model is likely to be the same as an NG, the dual IC would be about half that again.
And on top of all that, we'll produce code and documentation so there will be dual/quad IC examples to refer to. And we've created a "new brand" moving away from the "duino" since objections have been voiced about the number of compatibles out there using "duino", which we think is fair enough since you don't see cars on the road with the name LancerBMW or SigmaBMW, even though they all use petrol, doesn't mean they should carry the name or part-of anothers more established brand.
Each product should stand it's own ground using it's own branding, and since we already have a commercial outlet for them, that shouldn't be a problem. In the world of OpenSource CMS's - it's called forking