selectronics

if you ever want to convert your project to something commercial, I would still consider raspberry pi and beaglebone instead based on software maturity and community support and their ecosystem at large.

Seconding this for the Beaglebone Black (including the Industrial variant). FreeBSD support and onboard Ethernet set it apart from some alternatives.

Mechanical watches fit the bill here. Not everyone has them, but they are common enough

Chiming in that this applies to controls engineering as well (think PLCs). Start from the IO, cross-reference that through the rest to get a feel of chains of causality and how it all works. Oftentimes it's critical to go from zero to applying changes as quickly as possible when unfamiliar (and poorly documented!) machinery is down.

It surely would still make a difference, even though China's reaction would partially negate it, right? When there's government stimulus money to be had, someone's going to jump on the opportunity to use it up, even if prices are lower from China.

Very cool!

Follow up idea, which I'm sure adds tons more complexity: have each face be a different material or finish. E.g. one face is stainless, another anodized aluminum, zinc plated for a third, brass on another. Each of the edge pieces would have to be a two-part assembly, and the corners composed of the three materials joined together (joinery, screws, brazing).

That surely would feel strange with the varying densities and thermal masses while solving, but would look very cool. To be fair, it appears from the pictures that each center piece's pattern is symmetric, which avoids the difficult part of aligning those when solving (center often doesn't line up when solving a cube with pictures on the faces in place of a solid color).

Probably far too niche for selling these to be profitable, but I'd love to have one.

Very frustrating dealing with these systems, as it's known ahead of time that the experience is going to be a fruitless slog. Perhaps this increased friction is by design, to reduce the incoming support call volume?

Fortunately, for some of these systems, ignoring the menu and stating "Operator" over and over does lead to a human, when there appears to be no path through the menus to otherwise reach one. I've heard that cursing at the automated system also leads to a redirect to a human, too.

The results of this are that delivery companies still occasionally "lose" my address and tell me it's invalid and cannot be reached, despite having previously done so numerous times! I have no way to get through to the proper resources to fix their system after over a year.

For one thing, they often make it against the ToS to host 'a server' (generally).

Beyond this, it can also be impossible due to lack of a static IP or control over the router (5G internet service with CGNAT). A VPS with WireGuard and remote port forwarding allows access for things like SSH.