You can't go wrong with an Arduino. You can use the Arduino IDE to get up to speed very quickly, and then later program it with avr-gcc and get rid of the Ardu

You can't go wrong with an Arduino. You can use the Arduino IDE to get up to speed very quickly, and then later program it with avr-gcc and get rid of the Arduino bootloader/libraries if you desire. The next logical progression IMHO after Arduino/AVR chips is bare metal ARM development. Check out chips like the NXP LPC series which can be programmed with a free GCC toolchain, and more importably support on chip debugging with OpenOCD. Good getting started guide here: https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-the-lpc810/introduction https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-the-lpc810/i...