00:00So you wanna start messing around with microcontrollers, but every time you look it up you get hit
00:04with a wall of jargon, 40 different boards, and prices that make you close the tab.
00:09I've been down that rabbit hole, and honestly, the RP2040 chip is the easiest place for a
00:14beginner to land. So I went digging and pulled together the 5 best RP2040 boards I could find,
00:20and yeah, a couple of these are under 5 bucks. Let's get into it.
00:26First up is the RP2040-0 mini board, and this thing is tiny, like, smaller than your thumb tiny.
00:32What I love about it for beginners is that it's got castellated edges, so you can either solder
00:37headers on and stick it in a breadboard, or surface mount it straight onto your own board
00:41later when you get more confident. It's running the dual-core processor, USB-C, and it's $4.24.
00:49Nearly 5,000 of these have sold with a 4.9 rating, which tells you people aren't getting burned.
00:55If you want something small enough to hide inside a project enclosure, this is your board.
01:00Next is the classic, the original Raspberry Pi Pico development board.
01:05This is the one every single tutorial on YouTube is built around,
01:09and that matters way more than people realize when you're starting out.
01:13When you get stuck at midnight wondering why your LED won't blink,
01:16you want the board that has 10,000 forum posts about it.
01:19Dual-core Cortex-M0+, tons of GPIO pins, MicroPython support out of the box, and it's $4.13.
01:27If this is your very first microcontroller ever, honestly just start here.
01:32It's the path of least resistance.
01:35Now if you're on a real budget, take a look at this one, the RP2040-0 module at $2.90.
01:42That's less than a coffee.
01:44Same dual-core chip, same capabilities, just the bare-bones package.
01:49And here's my honest advice, when you're learning, you're going to fry a board at some point.
01:54You'll wire something backwards, you'll push 5 volts where 3.3 belongs, it happens to everyone.
02:00At under $3, buy 2 or 3 of these and stop being scared of breaking things.
02:06That fear is what stops beginners more than anything else.
02:10The RP2040 Tiny is the one I'd point you toward if you're into wearables or anything that needs to be
02:15seriously compact.
02:16It splits the USB-C port onto a little separate adapter board,
02:20so the main module is almost impossibly small while still giving you 264 kilobytes of SRAM and 2 megabytes of
02:27flash.
02:28It works with C, C++, and the Arduino IDE, so if you've already dabbled with Arduino, your existing knowledge carries
02:35straight over.
02:36$4.49, and it's sitting at a perfect 5-star rating.
02:41That's not a number you see often.
02:43And last, the Pico W, the wireless version.
02:47This is the upgrade I'd tell you to grab as your second board,
02:50or even your first if you already know you want to build something connected.
02:54Built-in Wi-Fi means you can pull weather data, control stuff from your phone,
02:59log sensor readings to a web page, all that good IoT stuff.
03:02And it's $4.49, which is genuinely absurd for a Wi-Fi-capable microcontroller.
03:08A few years ago that would've cost you $30.
03:12It's rated 4.7, and it's the board that turns simple projects into actually useful ones.
03:18All five links are down in the description, so grab whichever one fits what you're building.
03:23If this helped you figure out where to start, drop a like and hit subscribe,
03:27I've got beginner project tutorials for these boards coming up next.
03:31Thanks for watching, and go build something!
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