$4 Dollar ARM development platform

Cypress Semiconductor a US based chip manufacture are pushing down the price point on Development boards. They have released two development boards based on there PSoC 4 series Microcontrollers and priced the boards at $4.

The Unimaginatively Named PSoC 4100 and 4200 Prototyping Kit are powered the PSoC 4 ARM Cortex-M0+ based with a nice stack of peripherals including UART, SPI, I2C PWM and on the 4200 kit and an upto 12 bit 1Msps SAR ADC this is not to mention 36 GPIO pins.

The added bonuses of this board is that it comes with a built in programmer that can be broken away to embed the board into your design while retaining the programmer so it it possible to flash already embedded MCU's

These Development boards are a very cost effective way of getting it ARMv6 programming and 32-bit architecture. The development suite is a little tricky to get up and running but it does have a few nice features like the ability to visually configure the MCU's IO ports and peripherals with the added bonus of being able to swap some peripheral pins around for your design. 

All in all I give this 3 Sparks cheap lead-in, but setting up could be easier.