As I mentioned in a comment, I've been playing with microcontrollers these days. I started out with a BASIC Stamp2 system which was great and very educational, but quickly ran into its limitations -- the main one being financial, each STAMP is around $40-50 which limits its applicability.
But the advantage of the STAMP is that it's very easy to program (in BASIC!) and that it has the ability to pulse PWM to control RC servos, which makes it ideal for EV projects.
On my explorations for a cheaper microcontroller, I came across the open source Arduino which was fantastic except that it was still expensive ($20 / chip for the cheapest) and the programming environment was more fidgety that I liked.
The solution appears to be PICAXE. The cheapest one is $3 / chip (wow!) and it can do full time PWM as well as has a A/D converter right in the chip. And its fully scalable as well. The BASIC programming language seems very similar to the STAMP and runs on Macs, Linux, and MS.
$3/chip for the 8M means that I'll be able to place them everywhere! Cheap is good!
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