You can mention the hardware in the main text and mention the help you got with this in a footnote. Alternatively, you could also include a reference and in the reference section you write his name and then specify in a short sentence the type of hardware that was provided. This is then similar to how people mention private communication in the references.

In the acknowledgements section, you can thank him for the help you got in an informal way. See e.g. this paper were colleagues were thanked for discussions and for "being cool":

Blockquote We would like to thank Shakir Mohamed, Fabio Viola, Oriol Vinyals, Irene Garnelo, Daniel Burgess, Kevin McKee and Ellen Clancy for insightful discussions and being pretty cool.

You can mention the hardware in the main text and mention the help you got with this in a footnote. Alternatively, you could also include a reference and in the reference section you write his name and then specify in a short sentence the type of hardware that was provided. This is then similar to how people mention private communication in the references.

In the acknowledgements section, you can thank him for the help you got in an informal way. See e.g. this paper were colleagues were thanked for discussions and for "being cool":

We would like to thank Shakir Mohamed, Fabio Viola, Oriol Vinyals, Irene Garnelo, Daniel Burgess, Kevin McKee and Ellen Clancy for insightful discussions and being pretty cool.