When I started building small electric projects a few years back, I turned to the Picaxe system. They use standard Pics loaded with their own firmware to make programming easy for hobbyists, and it is really easy with their examples. You can buy a prototype board like the arduino, all setup for your input/output devices, or the way I do, buy the cheap chip where you only have to build a simple program download circuit. Just checking a chip with 16 input/outputs works out at £2.40.

My next project will be using the arduino uno just to see what the fuss is about.