I’m making a project with a pi pico and it will have to do all of that. It already sends an update to the server per second with wifi. A full raspberry pi is over kill for most of these projects.

A Raspberry Pi Pico W is a microcontroller (no operating system) that incorporates Wifi. The way it works is you write a program that runs in a loop and talks to the GPIO ports or whatever. It's incredibly simple and it all runs from flash, so no operating system or anything else needed. They cost less than AUD 10 (about 7 US-bucks)

https://raspberry.piaustralia.com.au/products/raspberry-pi-p...

Since I am a Go developer, I like using TinyGo with these type of boards, which means I get concurrency (goroutines) as well, although sadly Tinygo doesn't yet support the Wifi module. However, I've used other boards with Wifi, and once you're connected to WiFi you can poll APIs and do anything else you do on the internet. No OS required!

As an example of a complete, stand-alone program, I wrote a digital clock in TinyGo. (https://github.com/doctor-eval/clocky) - you plug the Pico into a 7-segment display and it operates just like an old school digital clock.

Sadly it can't (yet) connect to the internet due to missing wifi support in Tinygo, and it's running on a pre-W Pico, but you get the idea.

If you are OK with FreeRTOS instead, then it's even cheaper.

The cheapest you can get is about $5(Espressif assembled board), with full LED matrix controller.(that's the cost of manufacturing, though)

a full blown Linux stack is $10+