The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017)
My favorite is the ATTINY 85. It&#x27;s so cheap and yet, it can do almost most of the things you can do an Arduino. And yes, you can program it using the Arduino IDE as well.<p>Last year, I started out to digitalize my entire house with these tiny ATTINY 85 chips and with some nrF wireless chips. It has worked really well for me and I&#x27;m able to control and monitor any power port in my house as well as my mains.<p>The overall setup still costed less than a Nest, yet, vastly more powerful. Of course, the downside is you need to write code, have a running server to control it on the cloud. But, no problem for me as I&#x27;m a (Google Cloud) consultant and this is what I do for a living.<p>I use Google Cloud&#x27;s IAP with AppEngine (I may switch to cloud run now, since it&#x27;s cheaper tho) and I have a private REST server running that I can access from my own Android app.<p>The whole thing took me a year to finish, but that&#x27;s because I worked on it maybe once or twice a week in the weekends and didn&#x27;t focus on it much.<p>But, my effort has paid off and it&#x27;s amazing to me that what is possible with just a dollar investment.