[sdiy] learning from early drum machines?

[Jason Proctor]

>Dan: the current popular way to get your feet wet with microcontrollers is
>the Arduino system. See http://arduino.cc/ .

i can second this. after some years of toying with the idea of 
getting into microcontrollers, i eventually decided on the Arduino 
because it met my requirements -

- cheap
- mac compatible
- uses a language i already know (C++)

- and also had the following cool things going for it -

- lots of variants available
- IDE or command line, your choice
- "shield" hardware expansion standard
- programmable via USB or SPI thing
- large responsive user base

so far i've been really impressed all round, things go together 
really easily. i'm putting together a prototype Arduino synth module 
which incorporates MIDI, analogue, and digital I/O, with a set of 
pinout conventions accompanying. the idea of course is to have a 
hardware/software platform and eventually grow a set of compliant 
applications.

this stuff is sporadically under discussion on the arduino_synth list 
at yahoo. y'all are welome.