Breaking out of the Espressif/Arduino rut

I have been noodling around with ESP8266/8285/32 microcontrollers almost exclusively now for a couple of years. 

The absolutely excellent price/feature/performance combo of these Espressif MCUs means I simply don't see any reason to change. There  have been a couple of things I built using AVR based Arduinos for very specific reasons to do with high I/O pin count or generating IR Lasertag signals with hardware timers, but that's it.

I've also mostly given up on Raspberry Pi based things because once an MCU has Wi-Fi and >64KB of RAM you can do most single-purpose things apart from a complicated GUI and I've been working on a workaround for the latter.

Likewise, much as people sneer at the Arduino IDE it is terribly easy to set up and use, broadly supported and just C++ (with an odd/incomplete selection of standard libraries) under the hood.

I have however been tempted by the new Raspberry Pi Pico. It's cheap (for now), dual core, has native USB, plenty of I/O and a massive push behind it comparable to the Adafruit Feather ecosystem. So I tacked a Pico and interesting carrier board onto an order from Pimoroni to have a play with one.

This could be my gateway to MicroPython, although I can see myself also having a go with C++ as this board is actually a good candidate for porting my serial terminal UI library, given it has no wireless connectivity.

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