Of course, that's usually followed by someone creating a fantastic handheld NES emulator as their first embedded project, and suddenly my untidy heap of wires and buttons doesn't feel so inspiring ...

Finally, unlike proprietary assistants, I can control everything. I can tweak the wake-word sensitivity or even train my own ...

There might seem like a wide gulf between the rapid prototyping of a project and learning a completely new electronics platform, but with the right set of tools, these two tasks can go hand-in-hand.