Well I finished it up, and finally got the RC values from the transmitter and receiver synced up.  Had to make the LSB an unsigned char before I could do math on it, I kept getting weird results.  Now everything works great and I did a little test flight this afternoon.  The codebender links for receiver and transmitter sketches are on the right, most of the instructions are within the comments of each sketch. Controlling my quadcopter is pretty sensitive, especially the throttle (Left trigger), but this can be easily alleviated by setting an exponential curve on your particular flight controller.  There's plenty of room on the transmitter to add some preprocessing to the RC signals.  A rolling average to slow the response might help a little, you could add dead zones and do plenty of other neat stuff.  I set up the A button to toggle AUX1 (arms my quad) between 1000 and 2000, you could easily set up an other button to do the same for any other auxiliary channel.