New series, hi! If you remember my old Linux Journeys posts, with the ricing and bootsplashes and tiling window managers, I'm doing something similar for hardware. I'm starting pretty much from zero.
I've made the magic smoke come out. I also once spent forty minutes debugging a circuit that wasn't plugged in. So there's plenty to write down, including the mistakes, while I still remember what confused me.
Software had started to feel a little too comfortable. I already spend most of my day on AI and agent memory, including Engrammic, and I wanted to learn something where I couldn't rely on what I already knew. With a circuit, I don't yet have much intuition for where to look when it fails.
So far, that has meant getting voltage and current straight, finding answers I should've looked up in the datasheet, and losing an evening to a breadboard. A loose wire can look like a much bigger problem until you move it and the circuit starts working. These are basic things, but they're the things I'm getting stuck on, so they're going in the log.
The projects I want to work toward involve privacy and anti-surveillance. If you've seen ØCLOAK on the site, that's part of it. There's also an early idea connecting hardware with my interest in the brain, but I don't have enough of it worked out to describe yet.
I'll write these as I learn, the way I did the Linux posts. Expect corrections, and if you spot something wrong, please tell me.
More soon, probably right after I replace the component I killed.
~ A.