Hmm. I finally recently purchased two "real" Arduinos (Duemilanoves).. one for my son who has become interested in it, and one for my own fiddling.. but up until now, I've used an Adafruit Boarduino.. like the Anarduino, it's not got the USB/UART on the board, you use an external one (which saves on cost) and also takes doing surface mount stuff out of the picture, as it's all through-hole components.. no reflow or pick-n-place needed.. I'm particularly fond of the Boarduino because it's built as a DIP, with machine pins set up to directly plug into a breadboard. I'm toying with the idea of coming up with a usable "socket", so that it's stamp-like in that you can yank the "stamp" easily and leave the rest of a project intact and waiting for the return of the "stamp".. though I suppose that's the basic idea of a shield, huh?
Joking on the scope, really.. I'm going to make a few calls to local junk dealers, I ought to be able to find a usable relic for cheap money.. I don't care if a knob is missing, etc.. One nice aspect of where I live is that I'm literally halfway between MIT and Worcester Polytech... junk dealers around here often have equipment that students have sold for beer money... not to mention the DEC (Compaq, HP, whoever owns them this week) sites and the Intel chip fab all within a half hour's drive. This area is second only to Silicon Valley in terms of what ends up in dumpsters and reclaim shops.. at one point, I had the better (the more expensive portions) part of a uVax in a closet, as well as half a dozen DEC AlphaStations. The uVax is long gone now, the AlphaStations I donated to a Linux cluster project doing genome sequencing as I remember. Those Alphas from a decade and a half back still can give a quadcore a run for it's money when running native (not Win64/Intel emulation/FX!32) raw number-crunching. Intel paid four and a half billion to bury that CPU, and the StrongARM.. the killing stroke for DEC. Anyway, the thing was, all of it was dumpster fodder at the time.
Wistfully remembering those Halcyon DECcie days... Ken, why has thou forsaken us? LOL....