If your interests lie in the robotics arena, the Arduino is a good choice for you. The folks at the Robot Shop have a good selection of resources to introduce the newcomer, or further educate the experienced robotics nut, especially in the areas of self autonomy and environment sensing.
Arduino Bricks are the Lego’s of the Arduino world. Plug and play modules of various sensors with a special shield (piggy back module) that sits on top of the Arduino. These consist of switches, sensors, relays, and many more modules to extend the ability of the Arduino to touch, smell, see and hear the world …
Learn how to turn a motor on and off, and control a motors speed with a microprocessor. See http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/motors_and_microcontrollers_101/
From http://openenergymonitor.org/ This is a project to develop and build open source energy monitoring, control and analysis tools for energy efficiency and distributed renewable microgeneration.These technologies are at the heart of sustainable energy systems, monitoring and controlling how energy flows between the various parts of the system. These tasks can be achieved using a low …
Ok, What’s a Ardunio? According to Wikipedia: An Arduino is a single-board microcontroller and a software suite for programming it. The hardware consists of a simple open hardware design for the controller with an Atmel AVR processor and on-board I/O support. The software consists of a standard programming language and the boot loader that runs …