Regrettably, one big disadvantage of the ARM processors for hobbyists is that they are not available in a convenient DIP package. Though they are inexpensive, they are obviously oriented toward consumer electronics and not hobbyists. This said, NXP seems to offer excellent documentation making it relative easy for someone like me to figure out how to use it, especially when one reads over old posts on the Yahoo LPC2000 newsgroup.

Certainly Microchip and Atmel/AVR are very hobbyist friendly and it shows because many hobbyist designs choose to use them. It would be ideal if NXP came out with a DIP40 version of LPC2106, for example, but I am not holding my breath.

If one can buy prefabricated electronics, FBD64 is really not a problem at all. I hope that at some point I can have a board fabbed for this purpose. Having a FBD64 package is only a problem if one is trying to use hobbyist-level tools to assemble a board.

I do not have any current plans to use the CAN bus, but the LPC2119 has CAN peripherals (and the ARM Stamp from Futurlec is less than $30 and has CAN). This has quite a bit more horsepower than a typical 8051, but not everyone needs ARM-level performance for their projects.