I got a RP2350 "Feather"[1] from Adafruit[2]. Amazing little thing, with lots of stuff built-in. The lipoly charge port is super useful and Just Works, and the STEMMA QT connector means no soldering or breadboards for simple projects. My main half-baked idea for this is to control a CPU usage monitor[3], but I also want to make some better lights for my Lego SHIELD Helicarrier, and maybe add some movement too. And now you're telling me I can use Lisp on this? It would be interesting to see how streamlined the development process is for each one of uLisp, CircuitPython, MicroPython, and Arduino/C. [1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/6000 [2] https://www.adafruit.com/new <-- one of my favourite places to window-shop :) [3] Yeah I'm rambling but my end goal is to drive an LED matrix that ends up looking like btop's CPU meter. Why not just show btop on a separate small screen? That is a very good question to which I have no answer.
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Personally a fan of Adafruit's Feather boards, their ESP32 Feather can probably use the WLED code as-is, and there's expansions that include all the LEDs already soldered https://www.adafruit.com/product/2945
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Wow! awesome news, I just bought a feather with esp32 to start playing with rust, and I'm considering taking the course from ferreous-system. Nice to see the progress by the community and how nice it looks developing for these devices. I remember having to do the same with C when I was studying in the university and it was a whole different story.
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You still can't get this on one package but the closest I've come so far is using a LoRa capable feather board [0] and a keyboard feathering [1]. This gets you much of the way there. [0] https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-feather/lora-radio-feath... [1] https://www.solder.party/docs/keyboard-featherwing/
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I'm in a pretty similar place a few months along (programmer getting into hobby electronics). I mostly buy from DigiKey. They have a very wide selection of professional stuff, and they also resell adadruit and other similar hobby stuff (I think adadruit is a great company that makes great products personally). You're not going to find a raspberry pi anywhere except from a scalper (~2x MSRP) for at least a few months, though. See https://rpilocator.com/?country=US . I started off with rpi, but quickly realized I preferred not having a whole OS to manage. All my projects are now using adadruit boards, mostly feather nrf52840 ($20, Bluetooth low energy, great rust or circuitpython support).
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STM is popular because their lineup is cheap, offers a lot of features, and the documentation is readily available. The flip side is that their errata is lengthy, the HAL is complex to support lots of different designs under the same product names, the documentation is poorly organized, and Mac compatibility needs a gigantic asterisk. You can also get a BlackPill (get the F411 version with 8MB flash) off of AliExpress for $0.99 from their official store. Unlike STM's own dev boards (Nucleo) you'll need a separate debug probe. RP is also cheap and has that pretty sweet programmable GPIO and documentation that everyone seems to love. Adafruit has an RP2040 Feather for $12, RP2350 for $15, or with an ESP32-C6 (RISC-V) for $15. Nordic stuff looks pretty sweet but is generally a bit expensive. I've been working on a HAL for an older Atmel SoC and absolutely loved the documentation. But Atmel stuff is expensive. Quality of the Chinese clones is iffy. I set myself back a bit by bricking my one board but am hoping to have a beta release in a month or so. More recent Atmel/Microchip stuff (D21, D51, E51) has a HAL that the Embassy folks seem to have overlooked. You can get them on Adafruit boards at varying price points. Or just pick something unsupported and start writing a HAL. It's a great way to get up close and personal with how everything fits together.