Yeah, I agree.

I know more than one old man who has jumped the fence for greener pastures, myself included

It's a lot more fun as a hobby.

I think a programmer should know a little bit of hardware at least.

If you're a masochist you can write verilog for high frequency trading firms and make a shitton heh

You're still into hardware then, *kinda*

I took one class with FPGA design on VHDL

Or work in medical decices

I hated it

Devices

Verilog is a little better

Not that much

yeah, it was suppose to teach you the basics to design your own logic gates and make a mux

really bad teacher

that would kill it yea. Most people use fpgas for glue logic anyways, which makes sense I guess. Pair a big fast chip with a bunch of programmable logic

yeah, I used a spartan for another project almost drag and dropping example code

depends on what you intend

But yea what a world we live in where the most economically viable things are usb power banks, not even a radio

Pretty stale

Where is my cyberpunk distopia?

Expressif is a cool shop but they're in Shanghai

Shanghai

I love the esp8266

I built a small accelerometer with it, really cool project

yeah it's kinda amazing how it kinda just appeared in 2014

Have you played with esp32 yt

Seems a little choked up in supply?

I'm not paying 20 bucks for the development boards

Yeah I'm thinking the price would drop eventually

Or maybe they're trying to recoup the costs of the laowais they hired

found a picture

meanwhile im playing with a bbc microbit

it sent tcp packets to a socket that acted as a virtual serial port

The same form factor with some sort of gsm chip baked in along with upstream vendor support could potentially change the world

and then a python app read from the serial and plotted the data

really fun

Cool 😃

I still have like 10 esp8266 12E

and i don't know what to do with them..

If you've never played with rockets before, get one (they're cheap) and you can use them as live data loggers