Getting into hardware

I’ve been in software for over ten years now, and I absolutely love what I do. But lately I’ve had an itch to build more tangible things. Things I can pick up and hold.

It isn’t a new itch. Long before I became a software engineer I was interested in building things. I remember my first robotics class in high school. The teacher would give us a task, something simple like sorting marbles, and we would build a small robot and write the code to get it done. We built some really cool things in that class. That was also the full extent of my experience with the mechanical and electrical side of engineering, but it gave me a good breadth of everything that goes into building a product. I was hands-on in all of it.

Software is the part that stuck, and I ran with it. Years ago, at the start of my career, I worked at a really cool startup. Most of the guys I worked with were hands-on, lower level hardware and software people. I never got into that side of things, and to be honest I never really understood it. Writing low level code took too much time, and I was never one for C or C++.

I love that what I do is both a hobby and a job. By day I code, by night I code. I build random things, mostly.

So I picked up a Raspberry Pi Pico starter kit. It’s a hobby, for now. In the box there is a breadboard, bags of sensors and jumper wires, a small LED matrix, a ring of lights, and a card with the pinout on it.

Right now I have the time, and this is something I’m looking forward to. I don’t know what I’ll build yet, and that’s part of it. I’m excited to learn the hardware side, build something cool with it, and then use what I learn to build bigger and better things.

That’s the goal right now. That’s what I’m up to these days.