The Pi Zero W is my default for the same reason, and most of mine were all of $5 due to sales at Microcenter. It's pretty hard to beat that unless you need more

The Pi Zero W is my default for the same reason, and most of mine were all of $5 due to sales at Microcenter. It's pretty hard to beat that unless you need more CPU power. Add an industrial MicroSD card for ~$15 (to prevent the infamous SD corruption) and it's still at the $20 point but far more reliable and versatile than many of the alternatives. Even some of my microcontroller boards cost more than that, and you can still program the Pi boards "bare metal" if you really want to, because they're popular enough that people have already done the work to make that possible. P.S., even with a Pi Zero (W or not), you can hook up a tiny I2S audio codec board for a line level[1] or amplified[2] audio output. [1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/3678 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3678 [2] https://www.adafruit.com/product/3006 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3006