After resisting for a while I decided to have a look and see what all the fuss with the Arduino was all about. I purchased a Freeduino and LCD Shield from eBay. I have been pleasantly surprised by just how easy it is to get started with these devices. The Arduino environment is C based and it's as easy as writing some code or loading a demo and hitting upload. The bootloader on the Freeduino does all the hard work for you. Now, which of my many projects shall I use this for? http://www.freeduino.org/