I have been playing with Arduino for few months and really liked it. However, after sometime I did run into several limitations with the current hardware platform it currently supports so I started looking at other solutions and the first hit as an ARM Cortex-M3 board with STM32F10x (ret6) mcu. This little thing is extremely powerful compared to that of what Arduino supports. This ARM Cortex-M3 runs at 72MHz having 512kb of flash memory and 64kb of RAM, wow! really plenty..

 

However, I did run into difficulties in programming its firmware as it's very difficult compared to Arduino platform. So after a while of learning and testing the codes, I did finally manage to work with it and found out that it's much more powerful than what I found out initially. From programming side, it's generally more difficult than Arduino. So what I did decide to start X duino project to create Arduino-like library for running on different hardware platforms. Currently this Arduin-like library works on ARM Cortex-M3 and is available. So if you feel like you can check out X duino ARM Cortex-M3 page