basic stamp

in desperate attempts to find out how to program microcontrollers and control motors, i came thru this stuff. its calld a basic stamp ckt. parallax inc makes these circuits. pretty expensive off the shelf comng to around 5K big bucks! it consists of a microcontroller pic16c57 wid other components and a serial port. jus plug this port to the pc and code in a lang called pbasic. hit run and the s/w doz the rest. it burns the program into the IC. it turns out much cheaper than an Ic burner but still expensive. i now off to findng a way to build this ckt.