I'm building a blade system on the cheap to learn how they work. I'm blogging my progress at http://keithmarsh.tumblr.com/. Hop over and take a look.

So far, I've got it running and [=shouts above fans=] an operating system installed

After reading my latest Make: magazine, there was a great article by a guy who made a simple spectrometer from an Arduino. I'd paid scant attention to this open source board in the past, not realising it was a complete development environment. It can be used on my laptop or on my Mac too.

I did a search on UK ebay and found this shop selling Diecimilas for 15 quid! I ordered one, a protoshield and an LCD shield (the shield idea is so cool). I've got an ethernet shield on the way!

When you want to dive in and start bit twiddling on a microcontroller, you need to know what infrastructure code has to exist before you implement your idea. If you haven't written for the device before, it's off to Google you go to hopefully find someone example code you can strip down to the bare essentials. Maybe I'm the guy that Google found. Hope this helps.

I bought a chip in a 14 pin TSSOP package (0.65mm between pins!) and a DIP converter the other week. To get one joined to the other, I bought a new soldering iron with a tip that's not as thick as my wrist, some tweezers, solder wick and a watchmakers loupe; Couldn't get any flux though.

"To get there, I wouldn't start from here". Let's do something easy first. Run the PIC from its internal clock at 8Mhz. Let's change an LED on RB0 every 0.1sec.