The oscillating op amp was down to cable impedance I think. In any case the answer is to put the strain bridge amp in the little blue box thus turning said cuboid into a mast head amplifier (no pun intended). while thinking about this i wondered about putting a uC with an ADC in there too and then just have a master controller with a network(maybe I2C/SPI or a PAN radio net) that would allow any add on you like to be put onto the net and involved in input or output.
Further to all this i would also like to have some real intelligence (def:using past experience to evaluate current experience to predict future experience and modify actions appropriately) in the thing, a bit like the SaSi to allow the user to decide which actions they like and which ones they want to have less often.
That of course would be a total redesign.
However if I am to redesign it from scratch I will use a touch screen OLED display for user interface and write all the source code in C on an AVR.
Delays delays delays. Just as well I don’t design these things for a big company.