Hey, if you're like me, you've seen a lot of crazy projects utilizing micro-controllers that look like they'd be a lot of fun to get into. They seem interesting, challenging, and, could teach a lot about electronics, programming, and a whole new world of creative control over the "machines."
But.. I'm a Mac type of guy, and the sad truth is that , right now, there aren't very many resources that allow someone with a Mac to get into micro-controllers easily. Almost all the documentation for 8051s, 8052s, the Arduino, etc. is written with the assumption that the user is sitting at a Windows PC or Linux. Some companies boast of cross-platform technology, but they are only talking about Linux, and as soon as you get close to the machine layer that deals with hardware–as micros do very early on–that's not cross-platform enough.
So here are some tips, links, and whatever I can scrounge up, about how to get up and running with a workable, and extremely affordable, tool-chain of development software that is focused on the Mac as the primary development platform, and guess what, it's a lot easier than you'd think.
