Reply to "Short Shifter"

Why not use stepper motors to control the tranny. Use 1 for rotation and another for forward/backward movement. You could run them both off a program stored in a easily programed chip like the BS2 (Basic Stamp).

You would need to add some sort of feedback loop to make sure the motors didn't overstep.

For the shifter you could make some sort of "NEW" style shifter plate. In each gate attach brush's (or some other contact type) to make an electrical contact to tell the chip what gear has been selected.

The benefit of something like this is that you could but in some new shifter stops and really turn it into a short shifter, plus easily add on paddle shifters.

Instead of brushes you could graft a couple of potentiometers to the shifter (same as a computer joystick works). This way would be harder to retrofit, but I think this is probably the better idea.

I hope thats not too long winded, I have been thinking about the best way to do this for awhile as well.