I went the MSP430 route, it was essentially free (from memory about US$5 incl postage). If you are on a very tight budget, this might be better. There are a t

I went the MSP430 route, it was essentially free (from memory about US$5 incl postage). If you are on a very tight budget, this might be better. There are a ton of free tutorials, forums, development tools available. The caveat is that setting up the dev environment in Linux is not that easy, whereas for Windows it is essentially plug-n-play. BTW, Texas Instruments has recently upgraded the MSP430 to 128K.