Just gotta get this off my chest: Mid 40 year old, played with electronics HEAPS as a kid/teenager. I'm Australian, so did the whole dick smith/commodore 64/basic programing/silicon chip magazine/300-in-1 kit (still got that). Finished school, got an apprenticeship, worked / studied /run a business etc etc... so all the electrics was left behind.

I ran a Pi2 for years with Fedora and nextcloud on it. It wasn't as solid as I expected, but I think that was my power supply, but it did 5+ years, I only upgraded after a catastrophic HDD failure. (I should pihole that pi now it's not being used) So I know a bit about the pi (only used it as a PC though) and linux/open source.

I seen this magazine (pictured) years ago upon release: So I grabbed it... and the pico has sat on the shelf all that time.... I patched up an Old Xbox, and I see people use picos to mess with the roms on them. I've got several 360's that need doing, so I better read about this pico thing....

OMG. Have I gone down a rabbit hole! I end up reading the pico datasheet almost word for word... They are incredible. 15 year old me DOES NOT BELIEVE THIS DEVICE IS ATTAINABLE!

And free with a magazine!

I've got so many things I need to do with it, that I thought I better get a breakout/expansion board... I grabbed a nice looking (to me) one off AliExpress.... it arrives, but is different from the schematic on their website. I message them to ask if they can give me the updated one... blow me down they do!!! So off to AI I go, how is this board powered???? The original board has the P-fet power system that the Pico Datasheet recommends!!!.. and now with the updates they've added polarity protection, ESD protection, High frequency filtering before and after the onboard power regulator, on top of the bulk filtering capacitors it already had...

I mean... I am speechless. This is literally what 15 year old me could never see being attainable.

In the modern age of opensource software (I'm a Mageia linux user: From the old Mandrake days) it seems crazy, but I bought a C book to learn programming (real programing not that Basic stuff), but could never afford the compiler!!!

Micropython... free... opensource...

Next time I head to the city I'm going to get a handful of pico's..... My OG xbox I bought new is finally going to get the front LCD display thanks to modxo.... via a pico!

My 360's are all getting jail broken...

While I agree with many about the current times being far from humanities greatest days, I'm certain that the maker and electronics era is still golden.

New to Pico/microcontrollers... Have I been missing out!