[lawry]

Funny as it is, you'll be spending more time figuring which components to buy and which ones you actually need. And eventually figuring out how to build enclosures/boxes for you projects. Power supply also seems to be a difficult topic to get right if you're building wireless projects.

There are tons of examples, tutorials, libraries available for Arduino, and keep in mind once you're done with prototyping you can just buy the Atmega328P (5$) and if you add an ESP8266 (5$) to the mix you can make anything wireless.

[patrickpkt]

Depending on what you're doing, you may be able to get by with just the ESP8266. The ESP-07 modules break out all of the gpio pins, and the NodeMCU firmware lets you program it in Lua.