I'm not a hardware expert as well. I've a technical ham radio license from when I was at school (pre 2000) which gave me a small advantage when getting into har

I'm not a hardware expert as well. I've a technical ham radio license from when I was at school (pre 2000) which gave me a small advantage when getting into hardware hacking. IMO Arduino's are great for getting started - especially the Arduino Uno as it's not stripped down like the Mini or Nano and can nicely be used with a breadboard. Plus in case you blow up the Atmel chip (e.g. by shortening pins so that they are dead) you could get a replacement chip for a few dollars and pull the old one out of the socket. I would recommend browsing over the tutorials here: http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage That should give you a hint on what you can do (programming and electric circuits). There's Arduino IDE which hides the toolchains from you (which is not bad at the beginning). As soon as you advance you can setup your own toolchains and use C directly.