Hi there!
I have just bought an Arduino UNO board and started playing with it under Windows. For those that doesn´t know, it is an "open-source electronics prototyping platform". Not only that, it is *very* easy to use: http://www.arduino.cc/
The board is connected to the PC by USB port and the driver shows it as an COM port. The software is open source and is part Java based, part native C (source available: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software ) and is available for MacOS X, Windows and Linux (both 32 and 64bit). Linux version seems to be just Java and some JNI .so to allow COM access. The software is a simple C compiler (GCC based, I believe) which is able to upload the program to Arduino board.
I was wondering if this kind of board will ever be usable under eComStation... :)
Regards,
DJC