The Nerdkit
One day over break, I was browsing Slashdot and saw a link in a comment to nerdkits.com. I did a bit of reading on the site, and it turns out that a "Nerdkit" is a set of all the components needed to make simple integrated devices. It's aimed at people who want to get involved in circuit design and programming but don't know how.
I didn't buy one right away. I waited a few days, to see if I was still interested. I was. I ordered a Nerdkit last Monday, and got it last Thursday. I spent the rest of the evening assembling it and going through the first project, a temperature sensor. It was really neat and a lot of fun. Best of all, I can see where it ties in with some classes I've had in the Computer Science department.
Two classes I've had, Assembly and System Architecture and Organization, both dealt with computer processors on a very low level. Material covered in that class is useful for making this nerd kit work; telling the processor how to make an LED light up, or how to read in a value from a temperature sensor and convert it to Fahrenheit degrees. I have only done two of the included projects; there are a few others like random number generation and making a simple calculator. After I exhaust those, and do a lot more reading about the included microcontroller, I may look into doing some more complicated projects, like a computer controlled milling machine.