8051 DEVELOPMENT BOARD
The Explore Ultra 8051 Kit comes with all the things required, not just for this experiment but for the entire series. The base board is fully open, no peripheral is directly connected to the MCU breakout board. You may connect any peripheral to any port/pin you wish. The kit is fully open source, you may use the schematics, the design files and all of the source code and build something cool on your own. And when you do that do not forget to share with us what you've done. We would be happy to see you building something cool.
The story of the Ultra Kit does not end here, we have even made the code libraries for all major 8-bit microcontrollers modular. It means you can simple upgrade or even switch your project to a different microcontroller/architecture without changing your application code. The kit ships with all the additional stuff mentioned below to get you started; kickstart your embedded development.