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I love tinkering with hardware. I just hate the debugging because now you have both physical on top of code debugging you have to deal with in order to find out

• octorian 9y ago
  But you get to play with lots of cool fancy equipment do to that debugging! (Okay, that equipment is also kinda expensive, and retains its value far longer than old computers... But even new stuff has gotten a lot cheaper than it used to be.)
• joezydeco 9y ago
  Typically on a new hardware design I'll write throwaway code that exercises all outputs. You use this to verify the schematic. Maybe half the time that code evolves into an API/HAL that the final application will use. Many times it also becomes code for manufacturing test (burn in with the test code, then reflash with final production firmware right before boxing) Starting out with application code on top of a brand new design will lead to madness. Take it in smaller steps.
• yoran 9y ago
  This takes me back to the days when I was an embedded software engineer. One day I had to write a Linux driver for a custom piece of hardware the company had developed. I just couldn't get it to work. While trying to understand what was going on, I literally went down the levels of abstraction until I was measuring voltages with an oscilloscope. Turns out that one of the resistors on the board wasn't properly soldered. It was a good journey from software to all the way down to hardware, but frustrating. Nowadays I develop web applications and I'm happy that I don't have to deal with this kind of problem anymore.