Sparkfun offering discounts on Arduino day

You can already get Chinese-made clones of the Pro Mini for less than $3, it's probably a good way to embed microcontrollers permanently in one-off projects.

The arduino is really just a breakout board for a microcontroller made by Atmel, with a simplified development environment to lower the barrier to entry. The microcontroller chip itself has always been a couple of dollars, and was before the arduino was invented.

Really you could say that paying $20/board to break out a $2 chip was the insane bit (of course, if it makes the difference between you tinkering and not tinkering, totally worth it). It certainly hasn't been the cost of making arduinos that's been holding back your 'amazingly disruptive disposable electronics' - no chinese factory will have been paying more than a few cents in total parts costs for their mass-produced widgets of this sort for years now.

If you want garage-tinkering-friendly microcontrollers, can I tempt you with the newish NXP LPC810 [1]? It has a 32-bit core which can run at 30MHz (as compared to the 8-bit core running at about 16MHz on the arduino, iirc), and they're $1.37 in single units, less than 60 cents if you want 1000. ARM maintain a whole GNU toolchain [2] to develop on them - it couldn't be easier.

[1] http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/LPC810M021FN8FP/568...

[2] https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded

Pretty much. I set one up for the first time a couple weeks ago and it could not have been easier. Bare minimum "hello world" would basically just be a board, a USB cable, a computer with a USB port, and an LED.

Linux, Windows, and Mac are all supported by the tools. Additionally the tools are very light weight, just about everything can run them no problem.

If you get a normal Arduino (there's a bajillion variants, so I won't address all of those) you need any computer made in the past 15 years running Linux / Windows / Mac, and a usb -> usb A connector. Most Arduinos include that. I suggest, however, you buy some electronic parts - a couple of LEDs or sensors - via a kit and a jumper kit (a bunch of pre-bent color coded sized wires) and a breadboard to experiment.

Also, check out for local hackerspacers, as there will definitely be people that to set you on the right path.

You'll want an Arduino that has headers and a usb connector already soldered on and the usb cable to fit it. That's really the bare minimum. From the article, this one looks like it would fit: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11575 and only $9 on sale day.

Now if you want it to do something you can see other than in the logs from within the IDE, that's when you start needing more stuff. Generally a breadboard, wires, and some components like leds and resistors come next; for making blinking lights, who doesn't like those?

As far as the computer, it can be best answered here but is just about anything you have: http://arduino.cc/en/Guide/HomePage in the getting started section.

You could try codebender ( https://codebender.cc/ ) which is a browser based IDE that requires a simple browser plugin to be installed to communicate with your arduino.

I like the BoArduino USB[1] for breadboarding. Use something like that if you like breadboards and don't intend to make use of any of the shields.

[1] https://www.adafruit.com/products/91

Uno R3 is your best bet. Simple to use and is the basis for most projects. Plus, it has USB for communication while some other boards don't.

I'd grab an uno. Great starter board.

There's the official arduino command line tool: https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/blob/ide-1.5.x/build/shar...

But you need to use their (terrible) IDE for writing your sketches this way.

You can also use avr dude; there's a sample makefile available here: http://playground.arduino.cc/Learning/CommandLine#.UzQ_ca1kF...

    Q: Can I use an Arduino board without the Arduino software?
    A: Sure. It's just an AVR development board, you can use straight AVR C or
       C++ (with avr-gcc and avrdude or AVR Studio) to program it.

    From: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/FAQ

As a side note, if you are feeling fancy, you can build your own firmware based on LUFA and load them into the Atmega chip the boards have as an USB-to-serial converter. That opens a world for pretty cool hacks too.

WinAVR is the windows suite. Compiler, Debugger, and Programmer compatible with the bootloader already on the Arduino.

I haven't personally done this yet, so I'm not sure if there is more to it, but there is a program called AVRDUDE[1], used to load the firmware onto the boards. I know that the Arduino IDE uses this behind the scenes. I'm not really sure about the compilers involved. Basically the Ardunio environment is just the toolchain and a bootloader. I know that there are a few different bootloaders around for the Adrduino compatible chips (such as the Adafruit "No-wait" bootloader[2]) to look for inspiration.

[1] http://www.nongnu.org/avrdude/ [2] http://learn.adafruit.com/arduino-tips-tricks-and-techniques...

You use a breakout board to get the connector you need to hook it up to your computer. So for the 5v mini you would get something like this: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9716

You then either solder on some headers and connect it to the breakout, program it, and then disconnect it when done or do some funky alligator clip madness to connect the breakout to the arduino.

Note that the pro already has the pins waiting for the breakout to be connected.

I don't see anything on that page that suggests it's US-only. Generally speaking, Sparkfun delivers internationally: https://www.sparkfun.com/static/customer_service#ShippingPol...