An Arduino Uno is ready to go out of the box with IDE and cable. I recommend that people buy Elegoo starter kits, which also come with components and instructi

An Arduino Uno is ready to go out of the box with IDE and cable. I recommend that people buy Elegoo starter kits, which also come with components and instructions for projects. The ecosystem is unsurpassed. It's also one of the simpler microcontrollers, so you're not overwhelmed if you want to peek under the hood. I might use an Arduino Nano on a rare occasion. The same goes for an ATtiny85. The 85's are great for size-constrained projects, and are suitable for running off of coin cells. The RP2040 tiny might be a good substitute nowadays with a more generous pin count, but a higher price. My go-to boards these days are STM32's and RP2040. I found the bluepills a lot of fiddle to work with, and I don't use them anymore. Maybe because I was using Chinese knock-offs. I recommend the Nucleo-64 F411RE because it has an ST-Link built-in, and you can transfer your code to a blackpill if you want to incorporate it onto a veroboard. The RP2040 is a great board, too. Their SDK is the gold standard of SDKs (although admittedly I haven't seen all of them). It's relatively easy to peer under the hood to see how the code works. What would be really great if they released boards that had ST-Link equivalents on them, like the Nucleo boards. Uploading code is then no longer a chore, and you can use debugging.