Published: July 11, 2026 The beginning About a couple months ago I purchased an Arduino Nano ESP32 dev board. I had this sudden itch and I wanted to play around with hardware. I don't really have much experience in this space, besides working on firmware for an IoT company over a decade ago, but I've written tons of software over the years. I was very surprised how quickly I was able to get the built-in LEDs to blink with Arduino IDE and some help from LLMs. After that I moved on to figure out how to build and flash firmware directly from the command line without having to deal with all these custom abstractions. I like operating from CLI. That was also somewhat easy and gave me confidence that I can go back to my normal tools (nvim) for working with code. The devboard itself does not have much going on. Next was getting some peripherals so I ordered a small LCD and BME280 temperature/humidity sensor breakout boards.…