One step up - or down, depending on your perspective - from software is hardware. This truism, like all good truisms, is only partly true. But for our purposes, it’s true enough.
I’ve been working on a number of projects over the last little bit that fall into the hardware space. Some are toys, some are tools, but all of them are an important part of learning to speak with the poisoned sand that thinks with lightning - that is to say, silicon-based microcontrollers.
In the 1990’s there was one toy virtually guaranteed to attract kids my age and annoy every adult possible - the gateway toy to teachers needing to confiscate digital equipment from their students. I’m speaking of the virtual pet, made popular under brand names like Tamagotchi and GigaPet. These small devices entertained you with monochrome-LCD representations of animals or other living creatures and screamed at you with tiny piezo speakers if you didn’t give them the attention they were rightfully trying to steal.
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“Eating one’s own dogfood” is a well-known concept in computing projects, and a frequent stomping grounds for the lab (consider please, Tapestry). For a computer enthusiast who is also into working with electronics, designing and producing your own keyboard is definitely high up on the list of such projects. Nothing else you could reasonably expect to design yourself would see as much use in a computer room, after all.
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What do you get when you combine a python module that runs as a service, Raspbian, and a Pimoroni GFX Hat? A LAN-wide messaging service with its own distinctive heads-up display. Leverage spare resources across your network to monitor and accept reports from other networked devices. Spy on your network services to make sure they haven’t gone down. Send messages at any of three severity levels from any application.
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