[grogenaut]

If you have some disposable income buy an Arduino kit from say elegoo. They come with a lot of little labs, basically 30 min - 1 hour exercises where you take one of the 30 physical devices it comes with and use it.a little bit of Lego like assembling of parts and copying some code from GitHub.

So like a led (light) is one lab. The next might be a photo sensor (signal with amount of light). After these two labs you can now make a night light. Or a rave strobe.

Do the switch or button lab and you can turn it on or off or change the pattern. After 30 labs you have a pretty good idea of what to do.

Now buy an esp32 that works with a breadboard and if you know basic http you now have an iot device.

I recently hooked an esp32 to a dht22 and started graphing temp in my gourmet mushroom enclosure in about an hour of watching baseball. Just sends data to influx and grafana on an rpi data hub