Too many electronics enthusiasts harbour a certain reluctance to enter the world of microcontrollers and programming. It really is not so difficult, as we will show by introducing four low-cost boards. You will see the setup and how some simple demo programs can be run so that early success is guaranteed. To get things going we gave a low-cost Arduino board to Burkhard Kainka who is one of our long-time contributors to Elektor and a specialist in many fields of electronics. His son Fabian will be giving us the lowdown on the NodeMCU board — a platform designed especially for IoT applications.