For many reasons, mostly not so good, I want to get the gear needed to hack some kind of microcontroller. After working on Andrew T's microphone board, and assembling the Bulbdial kit, I'm pretty sure AVRs are the devices to use, though I expect others will swear by PICs. In both cases there are way too many to choose from.
I plumped for an implausibly cheap programmer and USB / LCD / atmega16 demo board from Sure Electronics, hoping they would be happy with each other. Sure has an eBay shopfront, but it is cheaper to order from them direct. They screwed up my order a bit, giving me an LED controller or something in place of a power supply. I decided to wear that, as the postage was cheap and delivery rapid — Hong Kong Post airmail in about a week [*].
Things look promising. The board has a lot of stuff on it — a USB port, a temperature sensor, the LCD panel, and most importantly, all the ports broken out. Unfortunately it uses a Silicon Laboratories CP2012 chip to talk USB, and their driver for Mac OS X is pretty terrible, inducing kernel panics at critical moments, like device disconnection. Apparently there is a Linux driver now. The Windows driver is fine.
The programmer and board aren't totally happy with each other though; my first attempts at scraping programming info from the board failed, with the sort of errors that made me think the programmer was fine but the board recalcitrant. Fortunately one of the wise heads at AVRfreaks told me to remove the LCD board, and sure enough magic happened.
The plan is to prototype things on this board and then construct final versions on veroboard; the hope is that the other AVR chips are close enough to this stock atmega16 to reduce porting to a formality.
[*] Upon closer inspection I found that they got my order spot-on. The power supply is half of some kind of LED driver board, the other half being some kind of PIC, and hence the board is a lot larger than I expected. It has a different part number to what I ordered.