The Zen of Hardware

Sometimes you notice recurring patterns in your way to explore and make things.
You succeed, you fail, you are happy and you get angry.
You learn a lot of technical stuff and by miracle, but  ....    even in this very technical world, you learn something about yourself and the world...

This instructable is more about a lesson I learnt then really making something (although something is made).
My teacher for this very important lesson was hardware.

Since his lesson can be applied everywhere (that is, you can practice not getting angry everywhere),
I called "him" the "The Zen of Hardware".

Step 1: The first lesson: Hardware is always right!

There is a good (and hard) lesson to be learnt from Zen master Hardware.

Do you recognize this experience, for instance, you have already made hundreds of drawdio's and so you decide you need one more for a textile version, you want to make it in 5 minutes and suddenly it does not do its thing?

Now suddenly your project deadline is threatened because it takes an hour, or even more - somehow you lack some components, the combination of available parts didn't produce the sound, the soldering is chaotic?

You are getting angry, blame everything but yourself?

Hardware lesson number 1:
Hardware is always right, and you are not.

The mistake can be a speck of soldering making a shortcut, a broken connection, a battery a bit out of steam…

In contrast to hardware, for instance software or humans have a lot of ways to do what you want. In normal "soft" life when solution A doesn't function, B will, or C, so with a bit of trial and error everything can be made functioning (well functioning a little bit).
Hardware - 99.99 percent of the time - has only one way of functioning.
And if it doesn't function: YOU are to blame, nothing and nobody else.