alt Hacker News> Without something like those ESP32 modules, this would be much more difficult.
I don't disagree. It's important for us to recognize that we stand on the shoulders of giants, but I also think it's a little silly of a critique of someone happy about it being easier than he expected. It's true that hardware would be much harder if you had to do it all yourself, but is that meaningful? The wonders if the modern supply chain is that you don't need to do it all yourself.
Well the title and premise is a bit silly. If you're designing easy hardware by wiring parts together that already do all the hard stuff, then "hardware is not so hard" is something you might conclude, but that only applies for designing easy hardware like this. But if you are doing anything that pushes the limits or involves analog signals and having to worry about signal integrity and EMI and impedances and Laplace transfer functions all that other stuff that requires degrees, then "hardware is hard".