ARDUINO!

Heres some info on Arduino, its definitely the best way to go about doing this project as its so broad and the simple code is great for me, because I suck at coding! Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software on running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).

The boards can be built by hand or purchased preassembled; the software can be downloaded for free. The hardware reference designs (CAD files) are available under an open-source license, you are free to adapt them to your needs. Arduino received an Honorary Mention in the Digital Communities section of the 2006 Ars Electronica Prix. The Arduino team is: Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, and David Mellis." - Arduino Developers

After using Arduino in idat209 I feel this technology would be by far the best way to attempt completion of this project, I've had a lot of ideas for our visual aspects but not how to code it up yet but with Arduino you can find a lot of open-source code which is easy to adapt to your project so this hopefully won't be a problem. The problem with using Arduino is the cost, I am going to look at ways to get around this at the moment, one idea is to do the theory for the whole project but to just produce a small part of it.

Another way would be to mock up the whole thing with all the code to show I did do the work but I don't have the funds!