I've got an old Velleman PIC kit which is nice, but not laid out very well, the lack of a ZIF socket means I'm constantly stabbing my fingers with the pins, it's also has a rather narrow range of devices which it supports.

It needs to supported under linux, either homebrew or commercial I'm not fussed, as long as it's not too expensive. Serial would be nice too as the parallel port on my dev machine interferes with the USB so it's currently disabled.

I mentioned this before, I wouldn't bother using a PIC for a homebrew device anymore. Have a look a www.olimex.com at the philips LPC devices, these are ARM7TDMI chips which have an awful lot of stuff built it.

They use JTAG so you can debug from GDB, you have unlimited breakpoints if you're running from ram. You can get a board and jtag interface (you can get a board with a breakout to a DIP format for veroboard prototyping) for under £60. Obviously you also get to program in 'C' (using gcc) which is a darn sight more productive that programming in assembler.

We've used the LPC2106 and LPC2210 devices at work. We're also using the atmel ARM7SAM64S device which is dirt cheap (for it's spec), 3 euros in 100 offs, but these are harder to come by for "home" users as they're only just in full production.

Well this months elektor has an LPC2016 development board project in it. Looks like I'll build that, although at £11 a chip for a 2104 they're hardly cheap. I've tried to find info on the ARM7SAM64S but my googling has returned nothing.

Whoops. AT91SAM7S64 was what I meant to say.

I take it you mean LPC2106? The 2106 was one of the first in the philips range and is one of the most expensive of that family, mainly because it's got huge amounts of RAM & FLASH (compared to it's newer siblings).

Good luck!

[Edit]

I'm sure you're aware of it, but don't take any pricing from farnell/rs as being anywhere near actual cost. Arrow have the 2104 showing up at $9.95 in one offs.