I've been "unemployed" since last April and survived. I'll be reading this for tips on how to expand. Although I have been a programmer for most of my life, I always got called on to make things work. My heart is in the hardware.
If your heart is in the hardware, perhaps you should expand into embedded engineering? That's what I do.
I recently left a large computer company to start my own thing:
Embedded Excellence, inc.
Don't worry, mods, that's just a place-holder web page that I use while I think of something to put there...