I was working with a buddy on a “startup” that was more of a hobby than anything (and didn’t go anywhere). The prototypes were controlled by Arduino and Pis early on – ease of software development was key as we experimented with and dialed in the hardware. The later prototypes were going to use an ESP32 though, because we’re aren’t idiots.

I’m a hobbyist at best: it kills me that there are well paid “professional embedded software engineers” out there that can’t work with actual embedded hardware.