[raajg]

For someone unexperienced with ESP32 but wanting to dip your toes, I'd highly recommend M5Stack - https://m5stack.com/ . No affiliation whatsoever, but I started playing with some basic boards last year for the first time and the the tiny devices they build have so many different sensors, transmitters, etc that you can start with a lot of early experiments just using a single device and a USB-C cable.