MSP430LaunchPad

If you looking to play around with a Micro controller chip, but don't want to spend a lot of money. Then this new Development board from TI will fit your budget. Its called the MSP430 launchpad an starting as low as $4.35 from Digi-key, to $5.95 from other suppliers. Shipping was more then the cost of the board.

Photo above has header pins and SMD Crystal soldered in place.

What do you get for this low price:

Development board/Programmer/Debug board

Two 16 bit Micro Controller chips. The chip already in the socket 2231 had a built in Temperature sensor, 1 Watchdog/Interval timer, 1-16 bit, 8 ch. A/D converters, SPI/Ic2 interface. The other is a 2211 has just digital I/O, 1 Watchdog/Interval timer, 1-16 bit.

USB cable

32KHz SMD Clock Crystal

Header pins (Can be used to make your first shield)

TI has a free Development software/compiler(Windows), code examples, plus a large base of users producing projects and support.

If you run Linux there is a good base of support for it, and in which I use for my code development. See links on left side for setup.