Mike I'm interested (depending on the direction it takes).
I've floated the idea of a general purpose mosfet power stage with Sparkfun and have been doing some tinkering with a PCB layout for one. So far my interest is to tidy up the power stage of my dew heater but I've got some other things in mind as well. If I do my own PC board I might look at throwing an ATMega chip on board and rely on an external serial to USB breakout board.
I've also been eyeing off some of the touchscreen/LCD modules available as a control interface for some projects I'm considering. I've not thought much about the main control coming via a USB but I'm guessing that it might still be useful to have local control. I've not worked out yet just how much I'd have to spend to get a decent sized module for that and for astronomy purposes some thought would have to go into what light the LCD used.
You might want to have a browse around sites such as sparkfun.com and the Digi-key site. I'm not sure if this does PWM but it's otherwise interesting
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/Dk...=658-1038-5-ND
I've done some thinking about using Dallas 1-wire components for distributed control and may get back to looking at that some more. There seems to be some quite interesting devices in that range which might be great for reducing the amount of wires which need to go back to a main control point.
Bob