New series, hi! If you remember my old Linux Journeys posts, all the ricing and bootsplashes and tiling window manager stuff, this is that same energy pointed at a thing I'm genuinely, embarrassingly bad at, which is hardware.
And not "bad" like modest-brag bad, I mean bad like I have literally made the magic smoke come out, bad like I once spent forty minutes debugging a circuit that turned out to not be plugged in, that kind of bad, and I've decided to do it in public on purpose, because the alternative is doing it in private and pretending later that I always knew what a pull-up resistor was for.
So why hardware, and why now? Honestly because software started to feel a little too... comfortable, and a little too crowded, because everything is an AI wrapper of an AI wrapper right now and I already spend my whole day in that world anyway (agent memory, the whole Engrammic thing, more on that elsewhere), so I wanted a corner where the thing either works or it doesn't and no amount of vibing gets you past it, and hardware is exactly that corner, because physics does not do try/except, there's no console.log that saves you from a bad ground, and you cannot npm install your way out of not actually understanding what current is, the universe just quietly refuses to cooperate and won't even tell you why, and I find that weirdly honest, it's the most patient and least flattering teacher I've had since I stopped being a first-year who thought he could take 3rd-year courses (I did that, it went about as well as you'd expect).
There's this whole running list of things that have humbled me so far, all of them completely obvious to anyone with an EE background, like the fact that voltage and current are not the same thing and treating them like they are will cost you a component and your dignity, or that "it should work" is not a phrase hardware respects because it works or it doesn't and it does not care about your mental model, or that the datasheet had the answer the entire time because the datasheet always has the answer so just read the damn datasheet, or that a loose wire looks exactly like some profound conceptual failure right up until the second you jiggle it and everything springs to life, and every one of those is obvious to anyone who did this properly, which is kinda the whole point of writing them down, because somebody starting where I started might feel a little less alone knowing that a dude who builds AI systems for a living also spent a full evening getting absolutely defeated by a breadboard.
So where's all this going? I've got a direction, and some of it I'll be loud about, because I care a lot about privacy and anti-surveillance and there's a hardware-shaped version of that itch I've been circling for a while, and if you've seen ØCLOAK floating around my site then that's the neighborhood, building little things that put a bit of power back on the side of the actual person and not the people watching them. And then there's another one, a project that lives right at the intersection of hardware and the brain-shaped stuff I think about all day, and I'm just not gonna talk about it yet, and not to be coy for the aesthetic (okay, maybe a little for the aesthetic), it's genuinely just early and half-formed and I'd much rather show you a thing that works than describe a thing that might, so you'll know when it's ready, it'll be pretty obvious.
Anyway, this series is a log, not a tutorial, because I am absolutely not qualified to teach you hardware, I'm only qualified to fail at it in an entertaining and educational-by-accident way and write it all down, so expect wrong turns, and expect me to confidently state something in one post and quietly correct it three posts later, because that's the deal and honestly that's the whole point, so if you're also starting from zero on something scary then come do it badly right alongside me, because misery loves a breadboard.
More soon, probably right after I replace the component I killed.
~ A.