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Crossing the Divide From Software Dev To Hardware Dev
First time accepted submitter szczys writes "Quinn Dunki spent decades developing software before she fabricated her own 6502-based computer. Here she talks about crossing between software and hardware (or the other way around) and why this is easier today than it has been in the past."
Yeah, nowt wrong with playing with a 6502 - I grew up on them - but building a 6502-powered toy requires only a few tens of dollars, moderate skill with a soldering iron, and the ability to vaguely follow any of several dozen short articles on putting together a simple 8-bit machine.
Of course it's cool to build your own hobby quality 6502-based machine. And there are probably lots of EEs who would fail at such a project without assistance - not because it's wildly complex but because it's sufficiently esoteric. But that doesn't mean you're qualified to pontificate on the transition from pro s/w to pro h/w development just because you've built such a machine. The tools, goals, risks, breadth, imagination, etc. put into a hobby product are quite different from that put into a pro product.
To take another example, with my ham radio hat on I get involved in lots of cool projects which would never make for a saleable product, but which I'd never get the chance to do professionally anyway, because relevant demand is satisfied for the average consumer in a very different way (e.g. almost everyone is happy with relying on a huge amount of private and political infrastructure to communicate globally).