Hardware Hacking for Software Geeks

A presentation on getting started with embedded engineering. There is a lot to be said about the work area required for embedded engineering, what tools you will need and how to use them to accomplish useful tasks. An overview of hardware and software necessary to develop or reverse engineer embedded devices. As you will learn in this talk the tools are the same for both tasks.

When you begin an embedded project of your own, what chips do you want to use? How do you go about prototyping your hardware? What methods should be considered before designing the system. Is your task better suited to multiple microcontrollers? Once you start writing code, how do you test it? Will your method of loading a binary into your final hardware differ? Do you need to write a bootloader? All these questions need to have answers to tackle an embedded project, we will be showing a variety of methods to solve these common questions.

When reverse engineering a device, you need to figure out how it was put together. You need to get into the designer's head and figure out what methods were used to create the device. As you begin to answer these questions you can slowly unravel the device's secrets. We will show some techniques for reverse engineering embedded electronics and firmware and present a plethora of resources to start you off on your own journeys into this field.