I often feel the same urge to work on soft/hard stuff. Not sure why I don't actually do it. Although the current stuff I work on is very cool on its own and not Candy Crush. But it's really a scourge on this world that the top tier pay in the industry is to shove ads in front of people.

So I do physical things in my personal projects and then come to realize that the potential return on investment (time spent vs. expected money) would be peanuts in comparison to pure software. I would love to know of hardware related work that has decent margins. Or at least enough margins to justify paying a good salary to enough engineers to sustain them.