This is very much the case. Arduino gives you a nice board with a decent power circuit, clock circuit with crystal oscillator, strips of headers to plug wires i

This is very much the case. Arduino gives you a nice board with a decent power circuit, clock circuit with crystal oscillator, strips of headers to plug wires into, a USB connector, UART to USB adapter, and often other goodies. The exact same MCU, the ATMega328P can be had for $2.08 each[0], or less if you buy in bulk. For your $2, you get: * An internal oscillator which lets you run without an external clock circuit (typically limited to around 8MHz, and can cause clock drift, so not good of accurate timing is important). * Hardware UART interfacing logic * Hardware SPI interfacing logic * Hardware I2C interfacing logic * Several ADCs * 23 GPIOs * 2kB data memory * 1kB EEPROM * 32kb flash memroy There are other microcontrollers out there, each with their own trade-offs. I personally like AVRs, as they have good quality open source compilers, you can mooch off the Arduino community for libraries[3], and in-circuit programmers can be had for cheap[1]. If you want to learn more, I suggest this article[2]. 0 - https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology-Atmel/ATMEGA328P-PU?qs=K8BHR703ZXguOQv3sKbWcg%3D%3D https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology-At... 1 - https://www.adafruit.com/product/46 https://www.adafruit.com/product/46 2 - https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2007/using-avr-microcontrollers-minimalist-target-boards/ https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2007/using-avr-microcontrol... 3 - https://github.com/oshlab/Breadboard-Arduino https://github.com/oshlab/Breadboard-Arduino