In my second year of university, I learned about Arduino and microcontroller programming. After that, I built a few projects and to be honest, I actually learned the programming concepts while working with hardware.

But working with hardware is also very hard and painful.First of all, the programming language C++ or embedded C is very hard to learn.Then again, there is always some problem in the hardware part.Sometimes the wires are loose, sensors are not working, code is not compiling, power supply is not enough....😫

If you consider all these problems working with hardware, you can understand you need to choose a programming language that is easy to understand.At least one part of whole work will be less painful for you.

When I found about MicroPython my interest in IoT again came back to me.I had Python skill,so to get started with MicroPython was very easy for me.

If you search online, you will find everyone saying MicroPython is slow (and that's actually true),you should choose fast language like C++.But if you think more deeply you will understand we don't need to worry about speed in prototying stage or if you are building device for academic research purpose.

When you are just prototyping and building device for research/thesis or project to participate in competition, Micropython is perfect. It will save tons of time and pain.You can focus on other important stuff for your work.

You can go with cheap microcontroller like ESP32 or Raspberry Pi Pico W.These two support MicroPython.You can find detailed documentation of Micropython in here.

Even you can learn MicroPython using online simulator using WokWi. You will find tons of ready projects of others that will help you to learn.

Seeed Studio has also many free learning resources and for book,I recomend you MicroPython Programming with ESP32 and ESP8266 eBook by Rui Santos.

So, next time choose MicroPython for your project,happy learning!