[brk]

(assuming you are in the US). Go to Amazon, buy an ESP32 beginner kit, which should come with an ESP32 dev board, a handful of different sensors and components, and a breadboard and some wires. It will also have some sample code.

Go through a few of the basic modern IoT "hello world" examples, like making a web-enabled temperature sensor. Then google for "ESP32 [foo]", where foo is some random idea that you have for pretty much anything you can imagine that has even the remotest reason to be internet-connected.

Assuming that you are comfortable with at least semi-advanced software development, learning basic embedded stuff with ESP32 or Arduino is pretty easy. There is no operating system, or heavy stack, which can sometimes make things like a Raspberry Pi more overwhelming to start with in terms of embedded stuff.

[GordonS]

What would you think is the minimum age to do these kind of basic IoT tasks would be?

Looking forward to doing this stuff with my son at some point, but he's only 6 :)

[willdr]

I need some sort of basic guide to like, the actual hardware. Bought one of these but not keen to fry things accidentally...