Hardware

Recording and microphone hardware

Most microphones with pre-amps should work as long as the hardware is plugged into the analog ports of your microcontroller. If you are looking for a reference schematic I advice you to take a look at this stack exchange question. It shows all the necessary components.

Microcontroller

All arduino-compatible controllers should work independent of microcontroller architecture. I've been working with an arduino UNO. If you wish to port to a new platform, the platform MUST have 300 bytes of RAM and an analog to digital converter.

Using custom analog to digital converters

Read on the porting section.