Boards
There are four microcontroller boards that are popularly used for learning to build Physical Computing and IoT solutions. These are shown below:
Arduino Nano
The small and simple starter board from Arduino.
Espressif ESP32
A more advanced board with WiFi and Bluetooth(BLE).
Raspberry Pico
A simple board programmed using microPython.
STMicro STM32
A powerful, advanced board for complex solutions.
In addition to these there are two other boards that are quite popular.
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The Arduino UNO which is very similar in function to the Arduino Nano. The Arduino UNO is not breadboard mountable and has a larger size that the Nano but also has more available pins.
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The ESP8266 NodeMCU which is very similar in function to the ESP32 but only supports WiFi communication and not BLE communication.
Given these similarities we may specifically use these two boards in some projects but most projects will use one of the four boards listed first.