I just bought a PIC 18F458 development board from ______. My first project (after building an LM317-based 16v. PSU) was to get the thing operational... a task that consumed some time because of a lack of adequate instruction, the manufacturer's web site being in Thai, conflicting information on the accompanying CD, etc. It will blink a LED now, but only by a loss of considerable user persperation.
The Z80 inside the Timex Sinclair manipulating the screen in several weird ways some of them really fun. Later, an LCD controller with an 8052 using the BASIC interpreter.
Finally a real project: a thermometric data collector from 8, 16, 24 or 32 sensors (LM135 fed with a constant current from a LM134 ech), with display and sensor calibration using a PIC 16C57.
You can read about it, here: cablemodem.fibertel.com.ar/atferrari
First microcontroller project proper was a **broken link removed**. Built using an 8048 robbed off the floppy disk controller of a Victor 9000 / Sirius 1 computer.