7 ms·

I design interfaces for a living, but tinkering with hardware is one of the most satisfying journeys I know. Every now and then, like OP, I play around with dif

by fairpx 9y ago

I design interfaces for a living, but tinkering with hardware is one of the most satisfying journeys I know. Every now and then, like OP, I play around with different hardware projects. It's amazing how, showing a half-baked hardware project to a friend gets them a lot more exciting than showing them a nicely designed software project. It feels like when you're tinkering with hardware a lot more parts of the brain are challenged and thus generate a more fulfilling experience. I highly recommend everyone who's into software or design but never did anything with hardware to spend some time this week building a simple blinking LED project with the Arduino. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

Tade0 9y ago
I guess half of that satisfaction can be attributed to the fact, that hardware - especially analogue - is not as lenient about errors as software. If you burn a transistor you burn a transistor - it's now useless for its original purpose, so you have to triple check everything. Also there are 2nd and 3rd order effects that require experience to catch. Example: I was really happy that my two 555 timers driving some LEDs were synchronized so good until I realized that they were plugged into the same weak power source, so the voltage drop from power surges triggered them both.
- w-ll 9y ago
  I really got into building simple hardware while in college. For me it was about the physical aspect of it. Building software is amazing as the barrier is very low and you can iterate and experiment so fast. But 99% of software I've built exists only as 1s and 0s on a hard drive somewhere. There's something great about physically holding something you've built. I mainly built midi controllers for friends and other weird i/o devices, But the fact that (maybe) they are sitting somewhere collecting dust brings me joy.
lvoudour 9y ago
I feel the same with any project with "physical" results, from electronics to woodwork to fixing a leaking pipe. Don't know why but I get a fuzzy satisfaction that I never do with software. My previous job involved lots of lab work, soldering, debugging PCB issues, working with optical fibres, et al. Current job pays better and is complex enough, but it's just me sitting behind a screen all day remotely controlling a piece of hardware we just bought from someone else. I highly recommend everyone who's into software or design but never did anything with hardware to spend some time this week building a simple blinking LED project with the Arduino I second that. These days it's very easy to get some hobby projects going in no time and with a very low budget. Arduinos, FPGAs, simple PCB design, it will give you satisfaction and you'll definitely learn lots useful stuff in the process that's not necessarily tangentially related to software
IndrekR 9y ago
For last 16 years I have designed and manufactured "real hardware" for living (FPGAs, up to 18 layer PCBs, fast interfaces, RF, analog -- running an engineering house now). Yet I still tinker with electronics outside of the "real hardware work". It just is fun. Especially if you can teach it to others; or give them the everlasting tinkering bug!
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Interesting. I quit electronics once I figured out that software gives me 'infinite parts' at a zero budget. My ability to play around with electronics was always constrained by my parts budget. What kept me going was the ability to scrounge old stuff from the garbage and take it apart for parts, but then it was the luck of the draw and once things got really integrated that route was closed off. So now anything that I do that has to have an effect in the real world is put together with the absolute minimum in interface hardware and the remainder is software.
  - felipemnoa 9y ago
    >>I quit electronics once I figured out that software gives me 'infinite parts' at a zero budget. Same here. You can build virtually anything in software.
    - jjoonathan 9y ago
      Anything, so long as it interacts with the outside world exclusively through a screen, speakers, or API :)
      - vvanders 9y ago
        Right? Why didn't someone tell me that these newfangled SDRs worked purely through the magic of softrware.
        jacquesm 9y ago
        Missing a /s ? If not, what did you think the 'S' stood for?
amelius 9y ago
> ... gets them a lot more exciting than showing them a nicely designed software project Maybe because of the association that "software = free". Or because hardware is 3d while software is always 2d. Would you get the same appreciation if you made a piece of hardware that connects to a monitor and shows a blinking dot?
- makapuf 9y ago
  That basically what I did by creating a small video console and making games work on this bare hardware. Having it generate sprites on screen from bare hardware was much more fun that using unity on a pc ...
kostarelo 9y ago
What would be a good project after a simple blinking LED project with the Arduino?
- acidburnNSA 9y ago
  Definitely a star-tracking camera mount for astrophotography. https://partofthething.com/thoughts/making-a-cheap-and-simple-barn-door-star-tracker-with-software-tangent-correction-for-astrophotography/ https://partofthething.com/thoughts/making-a-cheap-and-simpl...
- cr0sh 9y ago
  Learn about getting input - buttons, switches, potentiometers, etc. Then go for motor control: Servos, steppers, DC motors, relays, solenoids, h-bridges, PWM, etc. Add in some other sensors - perhaps ultrasonic distance sensing, Sharp IR sensors... ...then move into hacking on a Neato Lidar sensor... At this point - build a robot?
squarefoot 9y ago
"It feels like when you're tinkering with hardware a lot more parts of the brain are challenged and thus generate a more fulfilling experience." Probably a hardware object strikes more senses than a software for being something you can touch, but also feel the loss of it if it breaks, because you can't copy it just like lines of code.
- octorian 9y ago
  I think its really just that with hardware, you're building something "tangible" that feels like it actually exists in the real world. Meanwhile, with software, all your hard work exists entirely within a virtual space that you really cannot touch.
analog31 9y ago
It's amazing how, showing a half-baked hardware project to a friend gets them a lot more exciting than showing them a nicely designed software project. This might be something to think about when teaching programming to kids as well. Making an Arduino "do" something still involves programming, but with more tactile results and lower expectations for how much it has to resemble a professionally written app.
leggomylibro 9y ago
I couldn't agree more, but these days Arduinos are both limiting and expensive. Consider checking out an ARM Cortex-M board - you can get an STM32F103 'blue pill'[1] with 20KB RAM, 64KB flash, external oscillators, and a 72MHz clock speed for $5. Plus, it has lots of extra peripherals like a realtime clock which can run off of backup power and periodically wake the chip up from sleep. The future of embedded development is so bright, you gotta walk around with sunglasses on. [1]: http://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill http://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill
- vvanders 9y ago
  My current favorite arm cortex are cypress's psoc. They're basically cortex m0/m3 + embedded cpld that has a direct interconnect to cpu reg/interrupts.
  - leggomylibro 9y ago
    How's the open toolchain support with those chips? I've also heard good things about NXP's Cortex-M chips - apparently they let you map peripherals to whatever pins you want, which sounds neat. And TI's MSP432 chips apparently have fantastically low power consumption for their performance. Atmel's SAM chips look less promising, with minimal peripherals besides a weird common communication bus that seems to handle things like I2C/SPI/etc, if I'm reading the datasheets right. Does that sound right? It'd be nice to learn about all of them, but there are only so many hours in a day.
  - vkuruthers 9y ago
    I used one of their Cortex M3 parts on a project a while ago that needed a large number of SPI ports to drive strings of LEDs. Was very easy to get the initial POC working, and their IDE software worked surprisingly well.
- twtw 9y ago
  Agree re: official Arduinos. If you still want to use Arduino, I'd highly recommend going for Arduino clones from China. You should be aware that the USB chip is different so you may have driver issues, but I haven't had any issues on Linux. You can get an Uno clone for ~$3. It's also worth considering moving to the Atmega by itself You can get the chip used in the Uno for $2, set it up on a breadboard, program it with an Arduino as the ISP, still use arduino libs if you want, and eventually move to a custom PCB.
racer-v 9y ago
It feels like when you're tinkering with hardware a lot more parts of the brain are challenged and thus generate a more fulfilling experience. I totally agree with this sentiment, but I would add: I know a guy who designs hardware for a living, and he gets a huge kick from of writing a little Python script. The thrill is mostly in developing fledgeling skills far from your main wheelhouse.

by fairpx 9y ago

Tade0 9y ago

I guess half of that satisfaction can be attributed to the fact, that hardware - especially analogue - is not as lenient about errors as software. If you burn a transistor you burn a transistor - it's now useless for its original purpose, so you have to triple check everything. Also there are 2nd and 3rd order effects that require experience to catch. Example: I was really happy that my two 555 timers driving some LEDs were synchronized so good until I realized that they were plugged into the same weak power source, so the voltage drop from power surges triggered them both.

w-ll 9y ago
I really got into building simple hardware while in college. For me it was about the physical aspect of it. Building software is amazing as the barrier is very low and you can iterate and experiment so fast. But 99% of software I've built exists only as 1s and 0s on a hard drive somewhere. There's something great about physically holding something you've built. I mainly built midi controllers for friends and other weird i/o devices, But the fact that (maybe) they are sitting somewhere collecting dust brings me joy.

lvoudour 9y ago

I feel the same with any project with "physical" results, from electronics to woodwork to fixing a leaking pipe. Don't know why but I get a fuzzy satisfaction that I never do with software. My previous job involved lots of lab work, soldering, debugging PCB issues, working with optical fibres, et al. Current job pays better and is complex enough, but it's just me sitting behind a screen all day remotely controlling a piece of hardware we just bought from someone else. I highly recommend everyone who's into software or design but never did anything with hardware to spend some time this week building a simple blinking LED project with the Arduino I second that. These days it's very easy to get some hobby projects going in no time and with a very low budget. Arduinos, FPGAs, simple PCB design, it will give you satisfaction and you'll definitely learn lots useful stuff in the process that's not necessarily tangentially related to software

IndrekR 9y ago

For last 16 years I have designed and manufactured "real hardware" for living (FPGAs, up to 18 layer PCBs, fast interfaces, RF, analog -- running an engineering house now). Yet I still tinker with electronics outside of the "real hardware work". It just is fun. Especially if you can teach it to others; or give them the everlasting tinkering bug!

jacquesm 9y ago
Interesting. I quit electronics once I figured out that software gives me 'infinite parts' at a zero budget. My ability to play around with electronics was always constrained by my parts budget. What kept me going was the ability to scrounge old stuff from the garbage and take it apart for parts, but then it was the luck of the draw and once things got really integrated that route was closed off. So now anything that I do that has to have an effect in the real world is put together with the absolute minimum in interface hardware and the remainder is software.
- felipemnoa 9y ago
  >>I quit electronics once I figured out that software gives me 'infinite parts' at a zero budget. Same here. You can build virtually anything in software.
  - jjoonathan 9y ago
    Anything, so long as it interacts with the outside world exclusively through a screen, speakers, or API :)
    - vvanders 9y ago
      Right? Why didn't someone tell me that these newfangled SDRs worked purely through the magic of softrware.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        Missing a /s ? If not, what did you think the 'S' stood for?

amelius 9y ago

> ... gets them a lot more exciting than showing them a nicely designed software project Maybe because of the association that "software = free". Or because hardware is 3d while software is always 2d. Would you get the same appreciation if you made a piece of hardware that connects to a monitor and shows a blinking dot?

makapuf 9y ago
That basically what I did by creating a small video console and making games work on this bare hardware. Having it generate sprites on screen from bare hardware was much more fun that using unity on a pc ...

kostarelo 9y ago

What would be a good project after a simple blinking LED project with the Arduino?

acidburnNSA 9y ago
Definitely a star-tracking camera mount for astrophotography. https://partofthething.com/thoughts/making-a-cheap-and-simple-barn-door-star-tracker-with-software-tangent-correction-for-astrophotography/ https://partofthething.com/thoughts/making-a-cheap-and-simpl...
cr0sh 9y ago
Learn about getting input - buttons, switches, potentiometers, etc. Then go for motor control: Servos, steppers, DC motors, relays, solenoids, h-bridges, PWM, etc. Add in some other sensors - perhaps ultrasonic distance sensing, Sharp IR sensors... ...then move into hacking on a Neato Lidar sensor... At this point - build a robot?

squarefoot 9y ago

"It feels like when you're tinkering with hardware a lot more parts of the brain are challenged and thus generate a more fulfilling experience." Probably a hardware object strikes more senses than a software for being something you can touch, but also feel the loss of it if it breaks, because you can't copy it just like lines of code.

octorian 9y ago
I think its really just that with hardware, you're building something "tangible" that feels like it actually exists in the real world. Meanwhile, with software, all your hard work exists entirely within a virtual space that you really cannot touch.

analog31 9y ago

It's amazing how, showing a half-baked hardware project to a friend gets them a lot more exciting than showing them a nicely designed software project. This might be something to think about when teaching programming to kids as well. Making an Arduino "do" something still involves programming, but with more tactile results and lower expectations for how much it has to resemble a professionally written app.

leggomylibro 9y ago

I couldn't agree more, but these days Arduinos are both limiting and expensive. Consider checking out an ARM Cortex-M board - you can get an STM32F103 'blue pill'[1] with 20KB RAM, 64KB flash, external oscillators, and a 72MHz clock speed for $5. Plus, it has lots of extra peripherals like a realtime clock which can run off of backup power and periodically wake the chip up from sleep. The future of embedded development is so bright, you gotta walk around with sunglasses on. [1]: http://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill http://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill

vvanders 9y ago
My current favorite arm cortex are cypress's psoc. They're basically cortex m0/m3 + embedded cpld that has a direct interconnect to cpu reg/interrupts.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  How's the open toolchain support with those chips? I've also heard good things about NXP's Cortex-M chips - apparently they let you map peripherals to whatever pins you want, which sounds neat. And TI's MSP432 chips apparently have fantastically low power consumption for their performance. Atmel's SAM chips look less promising, with minimal peripherals besides a weird common communication bus that seems to handle things like I2C/SPI/etc, if I'm reading the datasheets right. Does that sound right? It'd be nice to learn about all of them, but there are only so many hours in a day.
- vkuruthers 9y ago
  I used one of their Cortex M3 parts on a project a while ago that needed a large number of SPI ports to drive strings of LEDs. Was very easy to get the initial POC working, and their IDE software worked surprisingly well.
twtw 9y ago
Agree re: official Arduinos. If you still want to use Arduino, I'd highly recommend going for Arduino clones from China. You should be aware that the USB chip is different so you may have driver issues, but I haven't had any issues on Linux. You can get an Uno clone for ~$3. It's also worth considering moving to the Atmega by itself You can get the chip used in the Uno for $2, set it up on a breadboard, program it with an Arduino as the ISP, still use arduino libs if you want, and eventually move to a custom PCB.

racer-v 9y ago

It feels like when you're tinkering with hardware a lot more parts of the brain are challenged and thus generate a more fulfilling experience. I totally agree with this sentiment, but I would add: I know a guy who designs hardware for a living, and he gets a huge kick from of writing a little Python script. The thrill is mostly in developing fledgeling skills far from your main wheelhouse.