I heard lots of good things about Arduino as it entered the race with Basic Stamp at much lower price. In not so long, I bought an arduino-ready board from ETT to give it a try. Here is the spec of my board:
With this board, we can develop programs in two ways.

Either ways, after compiling you will get a hex file. If you are using Arduino IDE, you can upload hex file to the board without even know where the hex file is (quite convenient). However, you can also upload program via bootloader to the board manually by using program AVRDUDE from command line. (If you use AVR-GCC to compile the code, then you have to do it this way)
To program Arduino Board with AVRDUDE:
>> avrdude -c stk500 -p m168 -P com1 -b 19200 -U flash:w:ex1_1.hex:a -U flash:v:ex1_1.hex:a
*Note that there are no lab documents for this page. Please use the lab documents in the page Mechatronics Lab with PIC16F877 and I/O Board for board and wiring setup. You can also find this information in the source code.
| Labs* | ||
| Arduino | AVR-GCC | |
| Lab1: Seven-Segment & LED Display | ex1_1.pde ex1_2.pde | |
| Lab2: Character LCD Display | ex2_1.pde | |
| Lab3: Dot-Matrix LED Display | ex3_1.pde | |
| Lab4: Matrix Keyboard & Switch | ex4_1.pde | |
| Lab5: Stepping Motor, Speaker and Relay | ex5_1.pde ex5_2.pde ex5_3.pde ex5_4.pde ex5_5.pde ex5_6.pde |
|
| Lab6: Serial Communication | ex6_1.pde | |
| Lab7: Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) | ex7_1.pde | |
| Lab8: DC Motor Control | ex8_1.pde | |