Comment by varispeed

I found RPi to be unusable for anything remotely serious. Recently I got RPi 5 with NVMe hat. Had a lot of "fun" finding drive that will actually work with it, so more money and time spent. Got it working and found that it randomly dies after couple of days. The time and money spent I probably could be better off just getting one of those N100 mini PCs.

For dabbling with electronics Pico or STM32 seem more reasonable. RPi GPIO is too limited for anything that could use its processing power. Not sure if there are even any distributions that would support realtime operations with those pins or things like DMA, custom protocols working at 1x-1xx MHz speeds.