To interface the front panel buttons, IR receiver, and RI I/O with PC, I will use Arduino Nano. This board hosts an Atmel ATmega328 microcontroller (uC) and an FTDI FT232R USB-to-UART interface chip. Most of the ATmega328 GIO pins are made available (20 pins total), and the board can be powered solely by the USB bus power (although not sufficient for all of our needs).
The ATmega328 uC is equipped with 2 external interrupts (mapped to D2 and D3 pins) and 3 pin-change interrupts which can be software (semi-)selectable. The interrupts must be fully utilized to react to all user inputs (front-panel button presses, remote-control button presses, and RI input from the amp). It is also critical to wake Arduino from sleep state for it to power up the PC.
The idea is to mount this board on the (to-be-designed) front-panel PCB. Comparing its size to the original front-panel PCB indicates it can be doable.
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