The Arduino platform has proven to be a great way to learn basic scripting. Seeed Studios came out with a great little product that is a wonderful way to get started in Arduino for less than US$5.00. It has enough analog and digital I/O ports to control a camera with input from a PIR or other external source.
I use the UART TX/RX to program other peripherals. Here is a link to the product on the Seeed Studios web site.
https://www.seeedstudio.com/Seeeduino-X ... c12b3dcad9