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Comment by kbaker | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Also, the kinds of passive safety needed to not burn your house down in the event of a code error or other design issue.

The hardware design is the last line of defense before you can do real-world damage.

Things like fuses, ESD and surge protection, watchdog timers, often get overlooked in a hobbyist or even open-source design... it takes (sometimes hard-won) experience to know when these things are required.

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There are also some physical constraints as well. I have an essential tremor - painting warhammer minis and doing anything with a sodering gun are forever out of my reach.

That all said - I have written firmware for things that other people have wired and it's quite fun!

I have heard that using magnifying glasses or a microscope can help suppress shaking in the hands: it has a weirdly helpful interaction with the hand-eye feedback loop. Dunno if it would work for you, but it might be worth trying?

I'll have to give that a try - though it didn't seem to help my father very much. He was a model railroader and just got used to taking several dozen passes at painting cars and locomotives. For me myself I've found that stress tends to make it worse so it's a bit of a vicious cycle where trying to suppress shaking can spur it on more. Advice is never unappreciated though so thank you for you consideration!

FWIW, I have a terrible hand tremor as well. I've found that with a good, wide-aperture magnifying glass or binocular microscope, I'm able to do soldering and even chip-level wirebonding. Having an armrest or other surface I can support my forearm/wrist on, with a tight structural loop to the target, can also help a lot.

Second the armrest suggestion, it makes all the difference. You can be rock steady if you don't have to support the weight of your whole arm from the shoulder, the closer you can rest your hand to where the action is the more stable you'll become. Another thing that helps is breath control.

As much as I agree with this, buying off the shelf things, especially on the extremes of "very niche" (ok this kinda how's under your "hobbyist design" or "so general there are hundreds of knockoff versions with various cost cutting measures", there is no guarantee that they have thought of all (or any) of the required safety measures... Check out Big Clive on YouTube if you haven't already, and aren't afraid of knowing about all the different ways products skimp on safety.

watchdog timer is not hardware protection. It might seem like it is, as the timer itself is in hardware, and it does occasionally protect from hardware related lockups, but it's all too easy mistake to stick a watchdog refresh in a timer somewhere that still works even when rest of the code went tits up

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