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Cool Hardware

Here is the truth about cool hardware: the best gadgets are the ones that make you understand computing better, not the ones that merely look clever on a desk. A blinking LED you wired yourself beats a sealed plastic brick you can’t open.

What it is, in plain words

This page is a living shelf of hardware worth knowing if you like to tinker: small computers, microcontrollers, unusual keyboards, radios, and tools that sit at the boundary between software and electrons. It is not a buying guide for the latest phone. It is a list of things that teach.

Why it matters

Software is invisible. Hardware makes it physical – voltages, timing, antennas, motors. Spending time here improves every other layer: suddenly interrupts, buffers, baud rates and power draw stop being abstract. It is also fun, and fun is a legitimate reason to learn.

An everyday analogy: a kitchen versus meal kits

A meal kit is convenient and closed. A kitchen with knives, a stove and raw ingredients lets you cook anything and understand cooking. Cool hardware is kitchen equipment for computation.

A hands-on shelf (2026)

Single-board computers

Microcontrollers

Keyboards and input

Radio and sensing

Tools that pay for themselves

A first afternoon project

Buy a Pico, flash MicroPython, blink an LED, then read a button. When that works, read a BME280 over I²C and print temperature to the serial console. You have just done GPIO, buses and sensors – the same ideas inside every “real” system.

# on the Pico, with MicroPython REPL via serial
>>> from machine import Pin
>>> led = Pin(25, Pin.OUT)
>>> led.toggle()

Buying without regret

The hardware this site runs on: Vikix

My own daily machine, Vikix, is deliberately modest: Void Linux with the StumpWM window manager, chosen so that the whole stack stays understandable. The hardware lessons that matter most there are not exotic:

RISC-V: hardware you can actually read

The most exciting hardware story of the decade is RISC-V, an open instruction-set architecture that anyone may implement without a licence. By 2026 you can buy real boards: the Milk-V and StarFive boards run Linux, and microcontrollers like the ESP32-C series and the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 (whose RP2350 chip has RISC-V cores alongside ARM ones) put it on your desk for a few dollars.

Why it belongs on a “cool hardware” shelf: for the first time the whole stack, from the gate-level CPU design up through the assembly language, is open and documented. You can read the ISA manual in an afternoon, write a few instructions, and run them on silicon you did not have to sign an NDA to understand. That is Build a Computer in Your Head made real.

# Cross-assemble a tiny RISC-V program on Vikix (install the toolchain first)
# xbps-install -S cross-riscv64-linux-gnu qemu-user-static
riscv64-linux-gnu-gcc -static hello.c -o hello-rv
qemu-riscv64-static ./hello-rv      # run it without RISC-V hardware

qemu-user-static lets you run and debug RISC-V (or ARM) binaries on your x86 laptop, which is the cheapest way to start before a board arrives.

Radio: computing you can hear

The radio gear at the top of this page is not nostalgia. A cheap RTL-SDR dongle turns a laptop into a software-defined radio: the antenna feeds raw samples to your CPU, and software does the demodulation that used to need a shelf of analogue circuitry. Decode aircraft transponders (ADS-B), read weather-satellite images, or just watch the spectrum. It is the clearest demonstration there is that “signal processing” is ordinary code running on samples, the same data structures and algorithms as everything else, just arriving through the air.

Common misconceptions

Connections

Radio Stuff

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Tags: #Computing