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No, you don't need $20 programmers. I played with attiny85 microcontrollers in my pet projects. A $2 Arduino Nano is all it takes to program the chip.

Ah, that's right! I should have remembered, I have about 5 of them in my home shop setup.

Arduino Nano seems to be closer to $20 rather than $2. Where did you get that figure from?

Arduino is open-source. AliExpress has clones for under $2.

For just one unit I will just buy the original, I think, and support the project.

If you really want to overpay for what's basically a commodity these days, to support a project that was already wildly successful a decade ago and has outside growth several times the size of the original project... go ahead.

You can also get a Nucleo board from ST Micro for about $10. It has a built-in programmer.

And if you use your desktop computer, you can be up and coding in a few seconds. But as with the Pi, you won't be working with bare metal microcontrollers which are the point of the article.