recomendations for a microcontroller

Have a look at Parallax's Propeller chip.

You'll find a huge user base, thus readily available advice and help, if
you go with Microchip.  Atmel is also nice.

Word of advice, don't go looking for a chip with 32 DIO lines.  Go with
something smaller, and a DIO muliplexer.

ent.com:



What do you mean by "uploadable" by USB?
        -do initial in-circuit prgramming by USB?
        -communicate with the already programmed chip via USB?


The microchip PIC18F4550 has USB and 16K words flash/2048byte ram, 34 I/O
lines; $6.72  at Newark electronics (www.newark.com). You can buy a
commercial programmer that runs off of a USB port to burn the initial
code into it, if that's what you meant. You can program it to tx/rx over
USB (once the intial code to do so has been burned into it)if that's what
you meant. But you can't put it on a board, connect the board to your
PC's USB port and burn the initial program into it that I know of.

There are most likely USB boot loaders available for that family.

how do you get the bootloader into the device?

Normally with a device programmer-- many of which are USB.

The advantage, by the way, is that once the bootloader is taken care of,
you can reprogram the device without development tools--or in the field--or
by the end user, etc.

I agree.

I just wanted the original poster to understand that you can't get a
compiler, write some code to do something wonderful, buy a new PIC,
"put it on a board, connect the board to your
 PC's USB port and burn the initial program into it"

 it requires some programming hardware to get the process started.

whether that programming hardware loads the wonderful program code or a
bootloader is up to the original poster.