I highly suggest the "beginning embedded electronics" tutorials over at sparkfun (<a href="http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorials.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorials.php</a>), just to get yourself up to speed. I have no experience with any kind of hardware hacking (never even had one EE course in college) and I really thought they were great. The nice thing is that arduino (<a href="http://www.arduino.cc/" rel="nofollow">http://www.arduino.cc/</a>) makes it easy to get started, and then you can build more advanced stuff from there.