Oh, your first plan was to actually build a board to frob the buttons on the 808? If so, it was a good idea not to do that. I've used 808s in R/C and they're very finicky, they will just error out for no reason sometimes. The Mobius is more robust but throws off a lot of heat.

So did you end up using the 808/Mobius manufacturer in the process at all, or completely do everything from scratch? Is at least the lens module + camera controller chip a self-contained module? Would be interested to hear which vendors you used.