Arduino to the rescue

I think it was worth the effort to learn assembly, and to use PICs for experimental prototyping and the like. My biggest problem, though, is to get the PIC to 'talk' to the computer. It might not be too hard (everything is easy if you know how to do it, right?) but after reading several tutorials, a book (I did not read through the whole book, though, since I was hoping to find an easier way to gain the knowledge. Apparently, there are no short cuts to take, and I will just have to take the time it takes to read the book, and hopefully learn something new and interesting. But, since I do not have the time, or do not want to take the time, to read that book now, I opted to go with Arduino instead, which is about a 100 times easier when it comes to solve my problem. Again, what I could not figure out, was how to do the serial communication (or any other communication for that matter), which, in my opinion, is a crucial component when it comes to interactivity and usability in general. So, trying to do the same thing with Arduino, was more or less a piece of cake. I spent 3-4 hours debugging my code, though, since it behaved really strangely for a while, and it took me that long to figure out that it was not anything wrong with the code, but with my breadboard(!). Anyway, it did eventually work, and with that I could set up a simple interface with four potentiometers, making it really useful, at least in my opinion, for a lot of different applications.