Arduino VS Sanguino VS Arduino Mega

My buddy and fellow MakerBot operator has gone and posted up a great comparison of these three types of microcontrollers.

For those new to the game, a microcontroller is a little computer on a chip. The chip is on a little board that has places where you can connect sensors and motors and other components. You can use a simple interface to make it do things... for example, if you put a light sensor on it you could make it have an alarm beep whenever it got dark. That's a pretty boring example, but if you've got an imagination or have projects that require interactions with the outside world, microcontrollers get the gears in your head moving.

The arduino made all this programming both easy and open source and has inspired a family of microcontrollers. Zach's post will help you figure out which one is for you, but the basics are that the arduino is the basic simple microcontroller. If you want more I/Os, (which stands for Ins and Outs and are the pins that you can connect to components, therefore having more I/Os means you can connect more components) then you can get the Sanguino. If you need A LOT more pins, then go for the Arduino Mega.

Because they are open source, lots of people are playing with them and using them for all sorts of stuff and there is a ton of documentation on them. Tom Igoe has even written an awesome book to walk you through the whole process!

Like I said all the deets are in Zach's post and I also get to say that MakerBot Industries is the only place  that sells all three of these microcontrollers, so whichever one you decide is best for you, you can order them right up!