Get yourself an arduino or similar. You'll learn C, and working with such limited memory/cpu/program space will force you to learn all the leet optimisation tri

Get yourself an arduino or similar. You'll learn C, and working with such limited memory/cpu/program space will force you to learn all the leet optimisation tricks you crave. Plus you'll be making things flash, beep, and spin around, and probably also burn and explode if you keep at it. What more do you want? Tip: try and get away from the arduino libraries asap, they are widely held to be awful and they shield you from the intricacies of the hardware.