Should I use a Development Board ???

One of the questions I have heard a lot of people talk about is should they be using a development board for the project they are working on. For those who are not aware, a development board is a pcb that you get in the market that has the interfacing pins brought out using burg strips. These boards, produced by companies dedicated to hobby electronics or by the chip companies themselves make the interfacing a LOT easier. Things like programming the controller or testing the algorithms is a lot faster.

Now this is certainly my own perspective, but I suggest if you do have access to these, then go ahead and use them. Yes, you will lose out on the opportunity on doing the entire interfacing yourself and learning from it, but it will help you get started with making stuff and then later you can come back and learn the interfacing with added interest. Of the several boards available, I personally like to use the arduino development environment. The community support that you get is awesome, the price is reasonable and it is a great platform to test algorithms of your projects.

Besides this, there are several other options you have. Some of them are using chips by ATMEL, PIC microcontrollers, The Programmable System on Chip called PSOC by Cypress semiconductors, the latest Friendly ARM by Samsung. I think you may be able to gain access to them by just googling the names and then ordering.