wokwi-features VS Ethernet

No, no - I have a half a dozen RPi's of varying revisions. Since they run Linux and the SDcards are less than robust, anytime you accidentially trip the power (which to me happens several times during hardware debugging sessions) you risk scrambling the rootfs and thus need to reflash a new SDcard. Some SDcards get damaged.

I recommend using Arduino and/or Wokwi (https://wokwi.com/) to get started.

More Wokwi Integration: Wokwi is an amazing embedded simulator and is great for getting started quickly. For a learner, there's no need for toolchain setup or even the purchase of hardware. There are many features as well that make it quite a flexible tool supporting a lot of features right from the browser. Users can also vote for more features. Still maybe at some point, one might want to tinker with physical hardware. However, at that point, they would have gained some confidence first. Currently, only ESP boards are supported with Rust on Wokwi. I hope for the variety to expand soon.

In addition to the other great suggestions here I wanted to point out that you can practice and learn a lot for free using an online simulator such as wokwi.com and tinkercad.com (among others)! And you don't have to buy an Arduino or any parts to get started!

And you can prototype all of this first to get it working for free using an online simulator at sites like wokwi.com or tinkercad.com!

If you don't have the budget for real hardware consider the simulator at https://wokwi.com/ It works with Rust (at least for ESP32, haven't tried other architectures). Bonus: you can't blow up the electronics by a wiring mistake.

I spent a bit of time today with a few FastLED programs and uploaded them to wokwi.com on a simulated Arduino Nano and a WS2812 strip of 64 LED's (not in a 2D matrix). The chatgpt requests I made were:

https://tinyurl.com/yr34sym6

https://wokwi.com/ is great for simple, digital only stuff.

https://fritzing.org/ will kind of lay out the PCB for you, but it's kind of a pain in the ass.

Wokwi and Fritzing are more "Breadboard Simulators" than real circuit simulators, but they do have their place.

Another cool thing you may want to try is making a simulator https://wokwi.com/

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.