best kit for a noob

[sspbrad]

I have a project where I want to take a digital signal from circuit I made and do some simple counting and timing operations with. I have been looking at basic stamps, javelin stamps, and pickits. I have absolute zero experience with microcontrollers or programming and I am going to learn as I go. What setup would u guys recommend for this endeavour?

 

[(*steve*)]

For the simplicity and low cost, look at PICaxe chips. Whilst you may decide to move to a natively programmed PIC later, these are an easy introduction.

While the chips are more expensive than non-programmed PICs, the development environment is free (and simple) and the programmer is very cheap (it's just an RS232 cable and 2 resistors)