This isn’t a solution but it might bring you some cheer: buy yourself a few[1] of these: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-express/overvie

This isn’t a solution but it might bring you some cheer: buy yourself a few[1] of these: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-express/overview https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-expre... They have a killer feature: infrared send and receive. Making a network of weird flashy lights is all the joy of computing without any of the “this feels like my job” crap[8]. Press a button and the device appears as a USB drive. You build your project at https://makecode.adafruit.com/ https://makecode.adafruit.com/ into a firmware file ending in .UF2 and upload it the device. [1] ...and some battery packs, cable ties, USB A to micro B leads if you don’t have twelve billion already. [8] You might be tempted by the third party firmware/UF2 called “Circuit Python”, which lets you then code on the device directly in a cutdown version of Python3. For me, that felt too much like my day job :)