
Have you ever heard of
Arduino? It's billed as an open source electronics prototyping platform, and proponents claim that it could lead to devices capable of interaction not seen on today's computers. I'd say it's not entirely open source for several reasons, but it does leverage open source software components andᅠ an inexpensive starter hardware platform following many of the principles that open source projects follow. O'Reilly has just announced a $12.99 new book called
Getting Started with Arduino, intended to kick-start new Arduino projects.