See a sibling comment from @yoursunny about "hats." Microcontroller boards tend towards being general purpose, meaning you have to add sensors and actuators to realize any kind of useful application. For some of the more mature boards, there are aftermarket "hats," which are pin compatible boards that contain functionality to suit your interests, such as controlling relays, small to large numbers of LEDs, various physical and environmental sensors, etc. Many of these "hats" are accompanied by code libraries, so you don't have to delve too deep into the guts right away.
It wouldn't hurt to look for a completed project where someone has posted a tutorial on how they did it, and duplicate it. Then you can take small steps towards adapting it in a creative way, e.g., by writing new code for it, or adding more hardware goodies.
Like programming itself, you have to let hardware hacking grow on you. Maybe it will and maybe it won't. If it does, then it can be a fascinating rabbit hole to go down.
> It wouldn't hurt to look for a completed project where someone has posted a tutorial on how they did it, and duplicate it. Then you can take small steps towards adapting it in a creative way
Funny reading this advice after all the Copilot drama.
Admittedly, I come from more of a hardware background, and it has been a tradition going back at least a century, of people publishing DIY construction plans that they expected others to duplicate. Likewise in science, a published paper was supposed to provide enough information for a skilled person to reproduce the work. Also copyrights didn't readily apply to hardware, and things like electronic circuits were actually quite hard to patent.
Maybe life was a little bit simpler in some ways back then. Things that are now being hashed out regarding usage rights in the software world, were taken for granted in the early hobby and scientific communities.
My understanding of the Copilot issue is that it's hard to know the legality of using the code provided by the tool.
It wouldn't hurt to look for a completed project where someone has posted a tutorial on how they did it, and duplicate it. Then you can take small steps towards adapting it in a creative way, e.g., by writing new code for it, or adding more hardware goodies.
Like programming itself, you have to let hardware hacking grow on you. Maybe it will and maybe it won't. If it does, then it can be a fascinating rabbit hole to go down.