electronics kits/pcbs with unflashed microcontrollers and closed source firmwares always feel weird to me, like, here, do it yourself, but you can't see or analyze or easily introspect into everything that you're doing
it kind of feels like something that a model kit guy who is also an engineer would do
i very much enjoy building kits, but now that i'm beginning to understand a little bit more about electronics, i find these programmable and once-programmable little black boxes perplexing at best
@patchwork microcontrollers are perplexing at best to us too, and we know how they work to the point that we could literally design one from scratch
-F
@patchwork ah, we just really struggle whenever software is involved at all
-F
@Felthry we're bad at both, honestly, but it's fun to try and learn :333
@Felthry that's valid... i'm nowhere near that level of understanding. they've been handy tools for working in the periphery of electronics as someone with more of a software background, but coming to grips with how they work is still a dot on my horizon
the black box descriptor was more directed towards contexts where even the software running on the things is somehow obscured. a couple of the pcbs i've populated recently have had off-the-shelf microcontroller boards at their heart, but the firmware that runs on them was only distributed as precompiled binaries