Yes my company has the same problem. There are ECIA authorized distributors and non-authorized distributors. The non-authorized distributors claim to have quantities of parts. I'm not going to name names but you can often find them on sites like findchips.com. Source: almost 3 years ago

Assuming you don't heed my warning and don't mind your friends beating you to pulp, I'll help I've seen usb widgets that can control electrical things. I think I was a power strip that can be so controlled at adafruit.com. Likewise, I built a robot whose sensors and motors were controlled via usb. This was before the Raspberry Pi's, so I used a ITX board (small form PC motherboard that was running Linux). Source: 7 months ago

If you want to get into embedded programming I'd start at adafruit.com. Source: 11 months ago

Professional eval systems can be quite good, but what I'd recommend is going over to adafruit.com. They have a massive amount of small embeddable boards, as well as i2c peripheral boards when you just need that extra function. They are very easy to prototype in CircuitPython but can also be programmed with Arduino. I know you want to avoid Arduino, so what you want for a more professional environment is... Source: 12 months ago

Adafruit.com is an online store that sells all of this stuff though you can find everything much cheaper on alibaba, ebay and others. Adafruit is host to a whole library of projects and tutorials with comprehensive instructions, code and images. Source: about 1 year ago

Many of the suggestions here fit those cases: the PI, the Arduino. I'd like to recommend that you look at the controllers from AdaFruit. I've seen that they do a substantial amount of work to ensure that their controller boards work well with the chips and displays that thye do. Source: about 1 year ago