I bought a [Netduino](\"http://www.netduino.com/\") a couple of weeks ago and am planning on posting about my experimentation with it (& other related stuff). I've played with electronics since I was in high-school, but its amazing the recent breakthrough that makes this stuff accessible. Back then I would pour over the Apple \]\[ schematic and try to learn how that stuff worked and hook up simple circuits with TTL gates. In college I built a simple 6502 computer by wiring up the CPU and some SRAM and having manual switches to input stuff. I made a very simple boot loader, but it was such a pain to get it going I never made it do anything interesting.\\r\\n\\r\\nNow these new platforms are amazing. You can buy the Netduino which is an inexpensive 32-bit ARM microcontroller running the .NET Micro Framework, fire up Visual Studio, plug in the controller with an USB cable and hit F5 and its doing stuff. It has a bunch of I/O breakouts, and so you can build cool circuits from there. So far I made some simple light flashing things and a RGB LED controller that cycles the colors of a RGB LED and changes the cycle speed based on the setting of a pot. Next step is experimenting with some XBee controllers to do some simple mesh-networking. Part of the cool thing of those is it seems like simple functions can be wired directly to the XBee controller without needing a distinct microcontroller in each location.\\r\\n