Yeah, the Arduino really opened up the world of microcontrollers to a lot of people. It's easy to get started and the price is reasonable. I've used an Arduin

Yeah, the Arduino really opened up the world of microcontrollers to a lot of people. It's easy to get started and the price is reasonable. I've used an Arduino as a glorified breakout board thanks to the ICSP header (connected to an AVRISP mkII), and I've also used it with the Arduino IDE. It's a surprisingly versatile platform.