I’m looking to expand into hands on circuits etc. It’s been over 30 years since I’ve soldered any components and have forgotten so much. It’s time to get back in that direction.

Where I’m at: I’ve got 5 Raspberry Pi’s running 2 employee web login stations, 2 digital signage, and a Pi hole. Have new Pi4 8GB coming just to have something on hand for dabbling around with. I maintain a handful Ubuntu servers from a ssh terminal a few times a week.

Getting into Arduino will round out where I’m behind for getting into prototyping. Making multiple ethernet or WiFi based temp and humidity logging devices that connect to a web server is something I’d like to work toward. (I know there is off the shelf stuff that does this already)


Looking for kit suggestions from places like MicroCenter. Trying to avoid stuff that is junk.
Thanks

The SparkFun inventor’s kit is a good place to start, perhaps paired with one of those Chinese 37 sensor kits.

Even if you don’t buy the actual SparkFun kit, you can download their ‘textbook’ pdf and their libraries and sample programs for free.

(Depending on your experience with electronics and microcontrollers, it’s possible that you may be more advanced than that - SparkFun has ‘recently’ expanded their inventors kits beyond the starter version, with some more specialized kits, which either might be more appropriate for your level, or would offer additional directions to expand into after getting past the basics).

Also - once you’re comfortable prototyping with a stand-alone Arduino, I’d recommend moving to the ESP32 as the platform for enabling WiFi connectivity.

SparkFun has a number of different ESP32 boards (but there are certainly other options - adafruit is also a great source for hands-on tutorials, and they offer a wide variety of ESP32 boards (in the ‘feather’ form factor, for example) that will keep you busy for a long time).

You can program both the Arduino and the ESP32 boards using the Arduino IDE development environment, but if you really get into it you will want to investigate other programming environments, such as Platformio.

Adafruit is another good company with lots of options and nice tutorials.

I'm weird. I recommend Particle.IO boards. Native Arduino but they also have native WiFi or LTE.