Yeah. My "budget" for similar scale project (sw, fw, hw, enclosure co-design) in high school 24 years ago was about $200. I'd have loved to have these kinds of resources/lab tools access. I even made [private, so that tool makers did not patch the holes/obfuscate] cracks for Eagle, HI-TECH C compilers and Solid Edge, to have some nice SW tools to work with, without arbitrary limits.

But I sure had plenty of time, and it was fun to always be learning something new. Simpler times when it was out of reach to have anything done for me, like prototype PCBs and let alone assembly. :)

These days are absolutely crazy in comaprison, with all the ready-made SBCs or SBC modules, and free software, and like $4 PCB prototyping services and CNC machining, 3D printing, $15 powerful FPGAs, $7 fully Linux capable 1GHz Cortex-A7 tiny computer modules for bread-boards, and cheap components from China... Still remember going to a shop buying single unit amounts of SMD resistors and capacitors over the counter. Now I can get 4000 unit SMD sample book for a few $ and never think about it again. Even my 2000 self would be able to afford it without much trouble. It's kind of a force multiplier easily available even for high-schoolers.