How to get started in bioinformatics
You will find various bioinformatics tutorials on: https://www.biostars.org/t/Tutorials/

As a computational biologist I would however strongly suggest to attend biology lectures, and read many textbooks that cover topics outside of the favorite topics of today's bioinformatics (Bruce Albert's "Molecular Biology of the Cell" would be a good start):

Technical aspects are easy to solve, and learn (and also to outsource). The difficult part is to find smart problems, and to understand how you can solve some things faster than your competitors by combining bioinformatics with other approaches. 

BTW: I really like your idea to approach bioinformatics from the hard-ware side (also see evolvable hardware).