as you are not concerned about cost I would recommend a Microchip explorer 16
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It has lots of on board facilities (LEDs, LCD, pot, switches, temperature sensor, etc) and can support a range of PIC24, dsPIC and PIC32 microcontrollers via PIMs (plug in modules)
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there are a range of daughter boards can be plugged into the board to support USB, Ethernet, WiFi, Canbus, etc etc
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it needs a programmer - I would suggest an ICD3 which is very fast