Thanks. Yeah, I've been playing with MegaSquirt ECM's, which are a DIY electronic kit in a lot of ways. Picked up much of my skills from that. The programming, I used to program in Turbo Pascal as a teenager.. Hadn't done any in about 13 years, but over the summer I worked my way through two or three "Learn Objective C" books, because I wanted to get rich writing iPhone apps.. haha, that never panned out.. But it turns out I feel pretty comfortable programming in C on the Arduino now.
I'm definitely looking forward to getting my two sons into programming and building things. They're a bit young at this point, so they just tag along to see what comes out when I get done building things.
As for a next blinky light project.. I was leaning more towards doing a spinning disc with a row of LED's on it. I saw one on YouTube that was displaying words "in the ether". Very neat trick using POV..
But my next couple projects are less blinky, and more useful.. Knock based doorlock controller for the sliding glass door on the front of my house. It doesn't have a keyhole, so it's always a PITA to lock the house up when I leave. Arduino would solve that nicely.
And just for fun mostly, I'd like to make my garbage can take itself to the curb each week, and put itself away after the garbage truck comes through.. hehehe..