Back in the oldschool days in the 1990s, I remember our school had soldered diodes, that is, we pupils had to do so manually. That was quite fun. Unfortunately I haven't quite had a need or use case to do so again; I tried to get into arduino, but I found it too much needing self-learning. With that I mean I'd have to understand a lot in order to do something useful. I have no problem with learning something new, but my time is super-limited these days and I need to prioritize hard, so I kind of gave up. Perhaps I try for Raspberry Pi but I am afraid it will also require a lot of time investment before it becomes "useful" (aside from learning something new, which is always useful, but other things also need to be learned, so time is of limited value here).