Arduino

Since its going to be the backbone of my project, I thought I ought to talk a little about the Arduino and what it does.

"ARDUINO IS AN OPEN-SOURCE ELECTRONICS PROTOTYPING PLATFORM BASED ON FLEXIBLE, EASY-TO-USE HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE. IT'S INTENDED FOR ARTISTS, DESIGNERS, HOBBYISTS AND ANYONE INTERESTED IN CREATING INTERACTIVE OBJECTS OR ENVIRONMENTS."

 Arduino can be used to sense its environment through receiving input from a variety of input and affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors and other mechanisms (in my case it will be sensing where the user hand is).
The Arduino is programmed using its unique programming language which is based on wiring (an open source programming language which is based on elements of C and C++) and the Arduino Development Environment (based on the processing programming language).
Arduino can be used to create stand alone projects, or be used to communicate with software that is running on a computer like Flash, Processing and MaxMSP.
The software used for running Arduino is available for free from the Arduino website.
The Arduino is available under an open source license meaning that its freely adapted by its users.

Source http://arduino.cc/