Hardware Hacking

One of the nicest things about living in 2013 is the fact that computer hardware is cheap. Cheap enough that buying an extra computer to sit next to your TV or toaster or up in a weather balloon isn’t much of an expense to the average consumer. The Raspberry Pi is among the most popular and dramatic examples of this revolution, but compelling alternatives like the Beaglebone Black have been arriving on the market recently.

I’m interested in these little gadgets because they make electrical engineering and embedded systems a lot of fun. The possibilities are mind-boggling with the available cheap hardware, and working on random electronics projects is teaching me more about electricity than school ever did. Current is just like the amount of water flowing through a pipe, and voltage is like the pressure difference between two sections! Resistance is the diameter of the pipe or something like that. I never liked all the confusing homework problems with those abstract circuit diagrams because it seemed arbitrarily complicated. Now I’m actually learning how to read and write the language because knowing circuit design is necessary in order to build things.

A major in electrical engineering would probably involve quite a lot of lab work, but the mandatory textbook material makes it less accessible than it could otherwise be. I don’t mean to say that there is no use for a rigorous course of education – it obviously minimizes the inevitable gaps in domain knowledge. Still, unless you’re intending to find a salaried job in the field, it’s a lot cheaper and a lot more fun to just order a good soldering iron and pick something to build.