Moi,
I got an
mbed LPC 1768 board for the workplace lab as "swiss army knife".
Now the last time I've done
embedded programming was mid-90ies in assembler on an 8051, where I was glad to have at least some freeware "tools" so that I didn't have to calculate the byte offsets for the SHORTJMPs and branches manually... expected the worst here.
Well, to make a long story short, the first prototype to solve the original problem (bit pattern sequencer) took about 15 lines of codes and 30 minutes. Other "projects" during the same evening (mainly based on the abuse of example code) included an ethernet packet sniffer and the smallest web server I've ever seen
slightly over thumb size...
Maybe all this stuff isn't as hard as it used to be...
The abovementioned product: Highly recommended. Just ordered one for myself...