I recently purchased my first micro-controller to make a smart device I need for my home. I had no experience with such devices, did relatively little research, and bought the cheapest knock-off I could find. And it "just works". I ended up with an esp8266 based device for ~$3.80(https://ebay.to/2SmFx7Z); I'm sure I will find modules in the future which don't play nicely, or demand a number of pins this model lacks, but for a basic intro to the ecosystem it has been an incredibly smooth ride. I certainly have found the odd bit or two that I briefly stumbled over due to unfamiliarity with the framework, and there's a few things I've yet to work out(namely, how to test this code properly outside of a device), but overall it has been simply enjoyable. After making my device mostly functional for its intended purpose, I moved on to a task I figured that would be rather involved: adding the ability to remotely update the firmware so I may leave it in operation while adding features. As it turned out this took only about 10 lines of code to get the basic operation in place, taken from a platform-supplied example. If your background is coding and you haven't yet played around with a micro-controller/IoT platform like Arduino, I recommend you do; it is quite satisfying.
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