where should I be looking? Microcontroller/processor / Electronic hobby

"Circuit Cellar" and "Nuts & Volts" and the companion magazine "Servo"

Sparkfun is a good place to start for general dev boards. There are lots of others out there, of course, but they have a pretty representative selection of most flavors at good prices. The boards are listed under their "Development Tools" category.

I generally use Imagecraft's compilers for all of these. Good value and quality and, since I also use the compilers professionally, no complications about L/GPL licensing.

Mostly new:

A bit dated now, but this should help:

Thanks Rich - this is great help -David

p://

Any suggestions for surplus parts...mechanical and electronic?

Thanks

Sure; these are the ones that I've used but there are many others. Not necessarily surplus, a few are hobby/enthusiast targeted and others carry specialized tools, parts, or equipment that may be of interest or hard to find.

One line of controller boards to look into are the various Arduino and Freeduino boards. I recently bought a batch of Bare Bones Boards from the Modern Device Company,

They are available for as low as $10 each in quantity. As far as the test equipment is concerned, a friend of mine who has a small computer consulting business bought quite a bit of used test equipment on EBay recently, for about 10% of what the original cost would have been. Apparently, a failed dot-com was being liquidated.