well, if I threw $5 at a USB cable and some support circuitry (the board should provide a few usable things to play with), the worst I did was overpay for a usb cable. There's got to be a USB interface at least, which is cute enough to mess with for that money.
I'm still relatively new to microcontrollers and don't want to get too religious about any one platform, just for the sake of getting religion, if you know what I mean. I figure this is an easy way to suss out what TI has to offer for cheap money. Since I was a Z80 fan back in the day, and TI marketed heavy for Zilog, want to see how they are playing in the market these days. Big Motorola fan too, I LOVED those old 6502 days...
Besides, if we wanted to do things the "right" and "easy" way, we wouldn't be goofing around with arduinos either probably.. I mean sure there's a few folks making commercial products with these- but honestly, there's better choices of course, price wise, than arduino. I think you get what I mean- simply that this (arduino) is a great hobbyist platform, and that's good, because I'm a hobbyist
