landonfuller

I actually feel the opposite -- microcontrollers are exactly why I got back into electronics. Being able to write a few lines of code that interact with the 'real' world -- that's what I find exciting, and analog circuits are tedious necessities in comparison.

Regardless of your ultimate interest Arduino (and the AVR microcontroller family in general) is a decent place to start :)

If you do have previous development experience, you'll probably want to move past Arduino pretty quickly. You can pick up an Atmel STK500 development board for just $79, and either use it with AVR Studio or the open source toolchains (avrdude, avr-gcc, avr-libc, etc): http://store.atmel.com/PartDetail.aspx?q=p:1050007

Not entirely the case. Soylatte is what became the OpenJDK BSD Mac Port. It was granted re-licensing and was merged upstream to OpenJDK.

What this means:

- The Java 6 Java Research License (JRL) binaries are based on Sun's Java 6 JRL releases, which mean they closely mirror the shipping official Java 6. They are also out-of-date and no longer supported. You can only build them using the JRL sources available from Soylatte, and redistribution of code and binaries is limited by the JRL.

- The OpenJDK 6/7 binaries are built from the OpenJDK repository, which is where all the Soylatte and BSD patchset changes were merged. All current development occurs as part of the OpenJDK BSD-Port project, and the code and binaries are fully redistributable.

The project was always intended to help ensure continuity of Java on Mac OS X; integration with OpenJDK being the means to ensure ongoing support and encourage Sun/Oracle's adoption of official support for the platform.

I've updated the project goals on the home page accordingly:

- Support for Java 6 Development on Mac OS X 10.5 and later (including Mac OS X 10.7 Lion)