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copied!<p>If you know C or C++ and want to get a taste of embedded development, I'd also steer clear of Arduino as it has terrible price/performance compared to newer micros, particularly ARM Cortex devices. It has a great ecosystem and accessible toolchain, but if you aren't afraid to get down and dirty and work with some unfriendly tools, an ARM device will give you a better taste of embedded development.</p> <p>At the moment I think the best deal out there is <a href="http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/252419.jsp" rel="nofollow">STM32F4Discovery</a> from STMicroelectronics. They are around $20, have a C SDK and toolchain, and it's a real, powerful part that you would use to design and embedded device. Lots of peripherals and CPU (for what it is); the Cortex M4 core is pretty much state of the art for microcontrollers. The only real downside with that board is it doesn't have a little LCD display, but the dev kits that do tend to be over $50 (although if you want something like that, the <a href="https://estore.ti.com/Product3.aspx?ProductId=1894" rel="nofollow">TI/Stellaris Cortex M3 kits</a> are pretty nice too. You should be able to find plenty of resources for getting arm-eabi-gcc and OpenOCD (for program loading/debugging) set up on linux.</p> <p>Raspberry Pi sounds like it has a chance to own this segment soon, although I think it may be a bit more software-driven environment as it is a full-blown linux system, although it has headers for peripherals it may actually be a bit harder to prototype a simple embedded system with RPi compared to an MCU kit depending on what you want to do. Same deal with BeagleBoard or PandaBoard, they are different classes of system and if you just want to learn some electronics and prototype an idea or two may actually be more complexity than you want. Unfortunately availability of Raspberry Pi is currently somewhere between incredibly limited and someday soon so it's actually not a viable choice if you want to order something today.</p>

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