Arduino

Arduino is an Open-Source electronic prototyping plateforme with a large community, a lot of documentation and many many samples. The Arduino plateform is a simple board with input / output pins that can be used to create autonomous projects -or- projects connected to a computer and interacting with the world. Arduino IDE is a graphical development environment running on Windows, Mac and Linux. Arduino is addapted for any skill level.
Arduino is a great plateform to experiment and discover microcontroler programming or quickly create small projects.