I agree... as long as radios aren't involved. Getting parts with the necessary tolerances in low quantities and dealing with the board layout is kind of expens

I agree... as long as radios aren't involved. Getting parts with the necessary tolerances in low quantities and dealing with the board layout is kind of expensive. The analyzer you need to use to figure out why the radio is acting funny is pretty expensive too. I don't know how I could have done my senior radio project without access to my uni's pimped out RF lab. But yeah, I've made MCU boards in my toaster oven, it's fun times for little non-RF projects. The several gigabytes of stuff TI makes you install just to do hello world on their simple link products is kind of nuts though. There's nothing simple about it tbh.