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Here's my attempt at creating a development board for the Atmel ATMega8 microcontroller. I'm rather proud of it. It has no external electronic components; just some bits of wire and 6 pins creating the header for the programming cable. When hooked up to the PC with a Pololu USB to serial cable, it connected to AVRStudio 4.0 first time to have its ID read. It works, in other words, and I feel rather chuffed.
Why is this important? Well, microcontrollers are very special little computers, designed for running embedded applications - everything from the injectors in your car to your DVD player and beyond, to cool robots. They contain a small amount of memory into which you upload your program and store data. The memory is, get this, non-volatile! This means that you can switch off the power, and when you turn it back on, the program is still there!
Microcontrollers also have plenty of pins designed to be connected to other components, such as transistors to drive motors, directly to LEDs and LCD displays, etc. Most models can also measure analogue inputs from sensors, etc. Instead of learning electronics in any great depth, they make it possible to control things quickly and cheaply directly in software. Change the program, change the way the rest of the circuit functions. What's more, they're manufactured in their hundreds of millions each year, so the cost of that chip in the picture, despite being a real, functioning 16MHz computer in its own right (delivering nearly 16MIPS if you're interested) was just £1.73 retail from Rapid Electronics.
All this may seem unforgivably geeky, but there are a lot of people beavering away in sheds and on kitchen tables doing some genuinely cool things with mocrocontrollers. I'm almost at the point of doing the unthinkable and dropping my lovely Arduino robot controller and starting my robot head project again by "going native" by simply programming the chips directly for insertion into the "head".
