The best place to look for ideas is on MAKE.
Personally, I haven't bought into this movement, or the Arduino movements, but that might be because I am a hardware engineer, and would rather design and build my own platform. I guess these appeal to the non-electronics guys who just want to program.
People programming embedded devices though need to learn memory management skills. On embedded systems memory is not infinite.
I have also never programmed for a Linux environment, so that's kind of a problem for me.
My son's school is starting a Raspberry Pi club though, so maybe I should try to figure out if there is something really great about it that I am missing.
What does turn my crank though is this TI watch dev kit:
https://estore.ti.com/MSP-WDS430BT20...lay-P2447.aspx