I’ve had never really come into contact with hardware programming, working mostly in python or C#, until a friend of mine asked me for some help with programming a simple controller for RGB strips using Arduino Nanos.

We’d, of course, fail spectacularly.

Not only did our hardware not work quite like intended and a few Nanos died in the process(but that’s a story for another time), but I actually learned a lot from this and similar projects.

And I want to tell you some of my mistakes, what I learned by making them and how to prevent them.