Things I liked to play with

Time is the limit. Playing with tech, you have to make choices: what's simply interesting (many things!) and what's both interesting and fun, so much that you definitely want to spend your precious time with. But then time passes, and what was interesting loses its shiny aura. New rabbit holes await. The following are some digital playthings I had fun with, but not anymore.

Arduino boards

Oh, Arduino. Lilliputing owes a lot, if not all, to Arduino boards. Of course, a lot has changed since Arduino's first days and a big chunk of Arduino stuff is, today, even too much powerful and too much cloudificated to be really interesting for permacomputing(ish) projects. But the low-end boards are perfectly viable systems. And if you don't like the Arduino C-like language, there are other ways (MicroPython, MicroLisp, you name it). Unfortunately, post-Qualcomm Arduino isn't fun anymore. But there are alternatives.

6502 chips

The 6502 processor means childhood memories: for many of us it's been the gate to the microcomputer world in the 80s. The lucky ones got an Apple II, I got my Commodore 64 and started a long fight with ZX Spectrum lovers. 6502 Assembly is a good start to play with bits, bytes and registers. It’s easy enough not to be intimidating, but it’s a real Assembly for real applications. And there’s plenty of online courses (link) to learn it (most of them are focused on retrogaming platforms, tho).

6502 CPUs are also a good way to learn “programming with limitations”, since 6502-based systems didn’t offer much in terms of digital resources. That said, there’s plenty of room for improving your low-level programming skills: what you need is simply some software 6502 emulator. The bravest can emulate a 6502 chip in hardware, using some SBC to make a little portable retro machine.