came to say Arduino; I cut my teeth on Basic Stamps in school but today they still cost over $150 just to get all the hardware you need to started. And forget a

came to say Arduino; I cut my teeth on Basic Stamps in school but today they still cost over $150 just to get all the hardware you need to started. And forget about leaving just the brains in a home monitoring gadget or clock project, they cost over $50 each! Arduino MCUs can literally be removed from the developer board and function stand-alone with a few cents of external hardware, and the chip itself can be replaced with a blank for a few dollars.