Oh that reminds me. I wouldn't recommend PIC in the 21st century but there's a really cool project called BIO that is an open source alternative to Raspberry's PIO (programmable IO). It's RV32-E with custom x16-31 registers that control the pins directly. Very neat idea.
It's by Bunnies Huang and he talks about it in this talk about Xous.
The hardware is (or will be) here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/baochip
May be a bit hardcore for a beginner though.
Why? MATLAB is pretty dense normally, and most MATLAB code is hacky scripts that wouldn't bother with "boilerplate" anyway.