I went to a local electronics store and got one. I then looked on AliExpress and found them for a fraction of the price.
I mainly use ESP8266, as it’s cheaper but it’s less powerful and doesn’t have 5v output, just 3.3v (or at least the ones I have were like this).
I don’t have any real coding skill but between the Arduino IDE, ESPHome, MQTT and some mucking about, I got where I wanted to be.
The sensors are so inexpensive and there are so many (light, temperature, fire, smoke, moisture, humidity, distance, gasses, weight, open/close, current etc). It’s really impressive what is out there.
You can get those on banggood and aliexpress for incredibly cheap as well. You can look into nordic stuff as well for bluetooth related microboards to develop on.
If you're just starting out I can recommend looking at m5 which has nice little kits to get started. It's a bit pricier though. https://m5stack.com
The M5 kits caught my eye at MicroCenter a few weeks back when I was doing some holiday shopping, I couldn't tell if they were just toys or actually useful. Any pointers on them?
M5Stack is an AWS partner for a new “AWS IoT EduKit” so I imagine you will be seeing more projects using them in IoT roles. The getting started guide has some examples.