There’s a designer named Bradán Lane who makes some excellent hardware, and one of my favorite things he’s created is a set of challenge coin circuits. I won’t go into too much detail on them other than to note they have a fun story line, a series of challenges, and you have to exercise some basic hardware hacking skills to participate. If you’d like more details, please check out the listing for the coin on Tindie. But what if you don’t know how to get started? Well, a friend of mine (Visual) and I recently played through this, and thought we’d document how to get started for anyone who needs a little extra help. Let’s get started!
Continue reading “Starting the 2020 eChallenge Coin Redux”Introduction to Hardware Protocols
As you begin diving into hardware hacking and reading printed circuit boards (PCB) you will likely come across several common protocols. This article isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of content, but rather a quick guide to identifying which protocols are commonly used, what they require, and what common tools will let you interface with them. I’ll be covering the following protocols in this article:
- RS-232
- USB
- I2C
- SPI
- JTAG
- UART
- USART