jremington:
That is where you start. Get an Arduino and a couple of pushbuttons, and start with the example code provided by the free Arduino code development package (the IDE).Also learn to blink an LED without using delay, do several things "at the same time" and learn the programming language. Plenty of tutorials on line for just about any Arduino project you can imagine, including reading Morse code and converting it into text, sending text messages by SMS, etc.
alright thanks for the advice. I'll definitely start there.