Dear Sirs,
According to the brief description of the project, you're looking for a communication front-end for the new design. So the first step would be to define the contract between the ethernet communication module and the application. It is also important to define resource limits (such as dedicated SPI ports, interrupts, power consumption, redundancy, failsafe operation) This would be the first milestone of the project (about 2-3 days). After the interaction between the application and comms is established, the high level design of the comm module should be designed. This would be the second milestone (4 days). The third stage corresponds to the actual implementation and firsts trials (3 weeks). The last milestone is after all testing is done, and errors encountered during the testing stage are corrected.
I've been working with msp430 for about 6 years, g2231, f1611, f2274 and f5438, with different developing environments, CCS, IAR, mspgcc, RTOS from linux and windows.
If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to ask.
Regards
Jorge Villaverde