Speaking for myself (an unemployed tinkerer), I bought three Pi Picos instead of one Arduino because Picos were $4 and Arduinos were $24, meaning I could buy th

Speaking for myself (an unemployed tinkerer), I bought three Pi Picos instead of one Arduino because Picos were $4 and Arduinos were $24, meaning I could buy three Picos for half the price, and hang onto them for future projects I need a microcontroller for. I cannot justify buying a $24 Arduino to solder together a game controller to USB converter, when I can get a preflashed clone Arduino, plus custom PCB with three controller connectors (then solder them on myself), for $16. (makerfabs.com sells Arduino Nanos for $9 if you can trust them, which I don't since their website spawned a Russian liveinternet.ru popup window likely from a malicious script.) Later I found out that AliExpress sells clone Arduino Nanos for under $4 (https://github.com/timville85/TripleController#tested-parts https://github.com/timville85/TripleController#tested-parts), but by this time I had already bought three Picos and was learning to program the USB stack, PIO, and microcontroller gdb using a second Pico (not sure if ESP8266 or ESP32 requires a JTAG to debug, or you can use gdb over serial like https://arduino-esp8266.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gdb.html https://arduino-esp8266.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gdb.html).