Having never been much into electronics I got interested when the Arduino came out. But looking at the diagram I could see it was just an AMD chip with a handfu

Having never been much into electronics I got interested when the Arduino came out. But looking at the diagram I could see it was just an AMD chip with a handful of of passive components. I ordered a couple of the chips as through hole and set one up on a breadboard. I programmed it using the Arduino app, but hated that, so I set up without it, which wasn't much trouble. When I discovered ESPs, the Arduino app seemed the only viable route but I found Platformio had a good solution. All in all Arduino seems like an inspiration, without ever having been useful!