If you are interested in deploying LoRa — the low power long-range wireless technology — you might enjoy [Rui Santos’] project and video about using the ESP32 with the Arduino IDE to implement LoRa.
I built a whole-home ad blocker with a $7 ESP32-S3 board - and it took just minutes ...
My first foray into the IoT utilized the Espressif ESP8266, an SoC with 32-bit MCU and 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi built in. Since then, I have used many different module variants based on the microcontroller. So ...