ReflowMaster VS NanoSunTracker

I/O bound tasks sit well on ESP style boards (the D1-Mini boards go for under £6 in the U.K. on eBay - better boards are available) and I'm getting interested in low power boards - MakerMeik on YouTube has some great designs but my surface mount skills are zero. I need to play with the bigger ESP boards (Unexpected Maker has some great stuff) and their own network so I can get some info from the garage without extending the WiFi. BLE on the Pi boards has been fine (easier to use than the Apple OS random Mac addresses) but one update messed this up for a week or so (and I needed the update for another bug).

Have a look at the ESP32 boards (Unexpected Maker has some real small ones) and the attachInterrupt command.

Unexpected Maker also makes a bunch of ESP-based controllers that support CircuitPython and come in a variety of form factors. Can be a little harder to get hold of than adafruit boards though.

I dunno about cheaper, but you can get a lot of flexibility from some of Unexpected Maker’s boards: https://unexpectedmaker.com/

There are other more "deluxe" boards out there that can be great to use - anything by Unexpected Maker is top notch and, to me, worth the premium. But it may not be appropriate for you.

If you want a really deluxe board, Unexpected Maker builds and sells some really nice ones often with optimized very stable power, USB C, LiPo battery support, built-in RGB LEDs, or very small footprints. You can usually buy direct or via Adafruit.

Ah, I see, I got the vernacular wrong. Which gun are you using? I've been thinking of getting one or making one of these: https://github.com/UnexpectedMaker/ReflowMaster

Here is my Nano project. It has a Fritzing file, so you can see the schematic as well as the code.

Here's my sun tracker repo. I used this gimbal and these photoresistors. Here's what the cobbled-together project looks like (without the dividers between the photoresistors).