I highly suggest the "beginning embedded electronics" tutorials over at sparkfun (http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorials.php http://www.sparkfun.com/commerc

I highly suggest the "beginning embedded electronics" tutorials over at sparkfun (http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorials.php http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorials.php), just to get yourself up to speed. I have no experience with any kind of hardware hacking (never even had one EE course in college) and I really thought they were great. The nice thing is that arduino (http://www.arduino.cc/ http://www.arduino.cc/) makes it easy to get started, and then you can build more advanced stuff from there.