I don’t know much about electronics either, unfortunately. I spent a few years building just the software side out from scratch (just machine code) without using any existing software: https://github.com/akkartik/mu. But eventually I had some doubts about this direction: https://lobste.rs/s/h4lnkn/what_are_you_doing_this_week#c_juxc6y Lately I’ve compromised a little bit on not using any existing software. There’s lots of good stuff out there that’s worth using. Lua is a small, fast programming language implemented in just 12k lines of code. And it has a game engine (https://love2d.org) that’s a great sweet spot in implementation size vs features (though it’s a lot more than 12k lines :) So I’ve been adopting it exclusively for a few months. This is the largest project I’ve built with it: http://akkartik.name/lines.html. The goal is a program that is useful, easy to use, easy to build and easy to change to your needs. It’s not as energy-efficient as some of the other projects on that page, but hopefully it’s useful in some possible futures of this world.