Hardware vs. Software

I love working with hardware, but goddamnit, it is costly and more time consuming than software. They pretty much mutually exclusive things, but I can say that from purely a creators stand point, instant gratification with software is a plus. You can test your software without worrying if your computer will explode (aside from the occasional BSOD). You can rip parts of your program out, put it back together, make copies, etc...

Hardware... you need to be in fear of the smoke test or worse, the unexpected catch on fire and explode test. That is something I am not ever looking forward to for a few reasons:
A. It is dangerous, you can get hurt or seriously injured

B. It is goddamn expensive, because when you burn out a part you have that "Awww fuck" moment because chances are you don't have a replacement and sometimes the part cost like 50+ dollars.

C. When you wire things incorrectly either you are lucky it doesn't destroy itself and you can just rewire it; or you just fucked it all up by burning it all out or rewiring it will screw something up to the point of unusability. For example: cutting wires too short, burning components because of too much heat exposure during sodder jobs or making holes too big.

I am in the process of building an isolation transformer out of spare parts. I am afraid to blow a circuit while doing it, but I don't have a lot of options. Hardware is fun in the show off sense though, as in: look at what I built. Oh wow that's cool. Or hello world look at what I did - on youtube.

Drive

I recently got the drive to jump back on to some projects I laid away for a while. I submitted an article to code project finally and it was accepted. This made me happy. I am going to do some rather stupid and pointless projects because they are fun. I want to build a leave me alone box, singing floppy drives and hard drive speakers.

These are little projects to get me back into the mood of working with electronics and microcontrollers again. I have been spoiled by software. Software is instant gratification, hardware is a lot of hard work with horrible consequences when things go wrong. You tend to spend more money on hardware and risk damaging it when you are experimenting.