I never was much of a fan of the Raspberry Pi, but I really like the little Pico.
"Pico" is sort of a nickname for the little RP2040 single board computer that you can buy for $4 these days. Pico is the board and RP2040 is the chip on the board.
The chip itself sells for $1, but that is entirely academic for most people.
It has a dual core ARM Cortex M0+ running at 133 Mhz, along with 264k of internal ram and 2M bytes of off-chip flash. The board has a button labeled "bootsel" and the usual micro USB connector. No reset button sad to say, but you do get an onboard LED.
Now there is the Pico 2 (RP2350) with 520K ram instead of 264K. It also has 2 cores that run at 150 Mhz and 4M of flash instead of 2M. The extra RAM is the big deal to my way of thinking, and the extra flash is nice. The mild increase in CPU speed is no big deal, and the option to run RISC-V in the second core just seems silly. All this for only $6.
Tom's electronics pages / tom@mmto.org