So the level shifter for the capacitive touch controller (MPR121) came today... 

The interfaceBoard now has the touch controller, the nucleo, and arduino pro-mini (for the LED ring) and it's programmer....  I've got everything wired up and ready to test....which will happen tomorrow..

Here's a couple shots of the board as it stands..

This is of course the prototype..and I'll be creating the eagle schematics and board layouts from it as soon as it's all tested... The connector on the bottom right in the second picture is for the TFT display...

Update to this update... First failure..

I started my testing this afternoon...  Had a little trouble getting it to work at first...  Broke out the logic analyzer... turns out the sparkfun board for the MPR121 comes with the pullups active...and so does the level shifter breakout..  oops..  Tried again.. nope.  Long story short, I fumbled around... turned out to be the code..after I weeded out all the hardware glitches...  The code example on this page worked perfectly..  So... awesome!  I got the touch panel controller working, then I added that code to my test program for the TFT... made some mods and got it displaying a different screen for each button I press... Cool!...the road to progress... so then I started whipping up a little test keypad with some electrodes... and I look over and see a little puff of smoke and a TON of 'failure to communicate to i2c' errors zipping on the terminal screen... AGH...!!  I pull the power connectors, etc... the puff seemed to come from the failed capacitor on the 3.3v regulator (MIC5205-3.3BM5 (LB33))..  Not cool..  So......  Not entirely sure why it failed...except I had to salvage it from another board since I didn't have any laying around..  Looks like another order is in order..  Hopefully it didn't fry the MPR121 or the level shifter, etc..  I would be sad.. But I am going to order spares along with the cap to be sure... can't afford to wait!  

I've got a mouser order on its way for some additional parts to build up the CCD detector.. So looks like until then it's more work on the filter selector, etc..!