I've talked a bit about Raspberry Pis (and the lack of them lately), but they have a littke buddy contoller called the Pico Pi. Unlike the other bigger Pis like the 4 or the Zero, this little guy doesn't run a whole Operating System (OS) but really only one program at a time. For sensors or small tasks, this is actually fine -- to read a value or turn on a light, you only need a very small and lightweight bit of code.

So far I've just done a few toy things with the device, but it gives me ideas to build on to make it bigger. Right now I've gotten the on-board LED to flash and figured out how to take a temperature reading from the onboard sensor. I've also figured out how to wire up an external LED, although I'll have to dig out the bits to get this going.

On the strength of this success, I've gone ahead and ordered some wifi enabled boards. This is actually pretty neat, I feel a bit of traction in all of this. Cool!