haha... the poor thing doesnt' work. the chip driving it has trouble interrupting and subsequently responding to various input.
Dad stopped working on it becuase he's 1. way too busy (he just got a plane) 2. distracted with his own monster project. i'll take pics of it, but it really doesn't belong on an arduino forum. Its a 386 computer with mountains of hand built custom designed boards to drive motors and recieve signals from IR flag readers. its a trike, steel frame, welded together, runs on two deep cycle batteries. front tire is a front tire off of a law mower, rear tires are snowmobile track wheels. front tire drives, and turns for steering. There's a large wheel on the top that drives and turns, moving the lower half of a arm which is where the computer and a few more bits are stored. On the top right now is a 'eye' center, with 2 degrees of freedom for the housing, but each 'eye' has its own degree of freedom as well, the eyes can look independantly. I'll take some pictures, but like i said, this thing is definitively not arduino. 
The goal here is to segway into a more modern means of controlling robots, and to help my dad upgrade his old machine to overcome some of the headaches he's having with it.
To do that i need to understand arduino better, and to test my understanding, launch it onto a platform i already understand separate from the controller itself.
The problem i'm having is deciding HOW to pick an arduino, mostly because i'm trying to understand the capacities of the i/o, the difference between analog and digital, and in that, what sort of circuits i need to build for each of my i/o.