Prototyping hardware

Prototyping software is fairly easy, especially these days with LLM's like Claude and Codex.

Hardware is more complex. Integrating software with hardware increases complexity.

You might be tempted to start out using an STM32 or something more accepted in the "industry". Don't unless this is already your wheelhouse.

Start simple I prefer a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4. A Pi 5 works too but they use a lot more power if you are working say on a vehicle and want to power it off of a 12v cigarette lighter.

For software start with nodered: https://nodered.org/. It is usually bundled with the Raspberry Pi OS and it is simple to use, given its visual style. Check out their site for tutorials.

Don't think this is just for newbies. I've used this in professional environments on a number of projects to validate the idea. There's no need to go all out when the stakes are low.

Once the idea is validated you can take what you learned and move it to something that is better fit for production.

-Paul