In addition to the other suggestions regarding exception handling, one thing to consider when connecting to a hardware device is how your class will handle the situation where a device is not present or communication fails.
In the situation where you can't communicate with the device, you may need to provide some methods on your class to perform later initialization anyway. In that case, it may make more sense to just instantiate the object and then run through an initialization call. If the initialization fails, you can just keep the object around and try to initialize communication again at a later time. Or you may need to handle the situation where communication is lost after initialization. In either case, you will probably want to think about how you will design the class to handle communication problems in general and that may help you decide what you want to do in the constructor versus an initialization method.
When I've implemented classes that communicate with external hardware, I've found it easier to instantiate a "disconnected" object and provide methods for connecting and setting up initial status. This has generally provide more flexibility connecting/disconnecting/reconnecting with the device.
