Ethernet VS DFMiniMp3

arduino.cc has a lot of tutorials!

I was gonna say the arduino.cc site but that works too.

When you write your code and compile it, what environment are you doing it in? Are you using an online cloud service like arduino.cc's IoT cloud? Or have you downloaded and installed the Arduino IDE application from arduino.cc's software download page?

There are tons of libraries for the Arduino platform that people have written and there are many available for use with this module, so you don't have to do any super heavy lifting programming-wise. In the Arduino IDE you can download from arduino.cc I installed a couple of libraries just now as a test. The reason I installed them is because almost every library comes with several short example programs showing how to use the various features that their library offers.

Did all of it make sense? Could you do the projects he shows by yourself without starting and stopping the video? That might show areas that you would want to brush up on. Another great idea is to go through all of the commands on the arduino.cc language reference page. Make sure you instinctively understand what each function listed does and experiment with any that you aren't familiar with.

There are also IoT cloud style dashboards at places like arduino.cc that let you add various widgets for dials and controls to represent the data you have locally with your Arduino.

Mentioned at arduino.cc. Designed to generate a periodic interrupt, I'll have to code a little state machine to change the interval at every firing.

Without a good explanation from them I really wouldn't put much stock in it. If anything they're probably just trying to steer people away from CH340 devices in part because they are problem children and because arduino.cc themselves don't use them.

Ontop of this, step 3 and 5 are a must in learning. And don't think "it's just blinking, lame" think more of "what can I do with this?" Use arduino.cc for reference.

In the library examples from the library written by Michael Miller (makuna) there is an example program for the Arduino called PlayRandom.ino that is pretty much exactly the program that you are describing!

There are several libraries available to control this chipset with an Arduino. I decided to use the DFMiniMp3 library, and in order to make it work with my module, I contributed to the library: https://github.com/Makuna/DFMiniMp3/pull/77