By far and wide, this piece of green machine lovin is the simplest, most compatible, and cheapest ($21) development board. Its called the teensy. The name is a little girly, but don’t let this fool you -the board friggin SWEET!

Id give Sparkfun electronics’s $34 Arduino Stamp 5v more credit, but its clearly overpriced and sucks because Ive already fried around 3 of them (and soldering headers on an $18 Arduino Pro is gross and I feel like things die). Either way, sparkfun’s boards require you to drop an extra $20 on a stupid USB to FTDI adapter. The Teensy already has a USB controller built in on the ATMEGA32U4 chip. So, all you really need to for your next computer/sensor project is a USB-b cable and a breadboard (or not if you order the Teensy without pins $18) and a 6 pack of Blue Moon.

The teensy is compatible with the Arduino programming interface via teensyduino and teensy applications (both available on OSX!!) This means you can use Arduino’s massive library of obscure code with the teensy.

I’m using this board for a new project in the Ramachandran lab. Give a geek you love one for Christmas :)

For any EE people, here’s the ATMEGA32U4 pinout