Comment by tumidpandora

I'm starting out as well. If you prefer coding in python, raspberry pi or anything adafruit is a good place to start. If you're cool with c/c++ Arduino ecosystem is quite mature . I decided to stick to the former so it's a less steeper learning curve for me and my little one. Get a BBC Micro:bit v2 and/or a CircuitPlayground Express. Both have a ton of sensors on board (temp, tilt, light, humidity etc) and some leds/neo-pixels to play around. Once you play with some of that, and want to get your hands dirty with breadboarding and soldering, get a basic kit (e.g. raspberry pi pico etc) and use MakeCode to try out some simple circuits with your microbit or circuitplayground express as the signal provider, play with servos, hobby motors, do some basic projects. Once you feel you're a bit proficient, might one to check out LeRobot for an open source robotic arm that you could train with reinfocement learning.. this is not exhaustive or the only path, there's many others, this is just my 2cents. Hope this helps!