microcontrollers

An Apple WWDC24 session introducing Embedded Swift, a subset of Swift with no runtime that targets tiny microcontrollers. It demonstrates the idea on an off-the-shelf Matter smart home device.

Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) shows 'reverse emulation', using a Raspberry Pi in an NES cartridge to give an unmodified NES new abilities such as playing SNES games. The video starts in a strange way and gets stranger.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

Khalil Estell's CppCon 2024 talk argues C++ exceptions can reduce binary size in firmware. He digs into how exceptions work and how to shrink their code footprint on embedded platforms.

A Strange Loop 2019 talk by Aaron Cummings on the computing systems aboard Voyager 1 and 2, which control the spacecraft and record and return data decades after launch in 1977.

Tom Scott explains how he built his emoji keyboard, which turned out to be a series of bodged-together tools including AutoHotkey and LuaMacros. He tells stories about the value of quick-and-dirty solutions.

David Sachs of InvenSense explains how gyroscopes, accelerometers and compasses work on their own and together, demonstrated on a modified Android handset. He covers sensor fusion algorithms and why rotation math such as Euler angles matters.

A PyCon 2012 talk by Kurt Grandis on building an automated water-squirting turret that uses Python and computer vision to detect and drive off squirrels from a bird feeder.

Joe Grand recounts being hired to hack a Trezor One hardware wallet and recover $2 million of cryptocurrency. He describes three months of experimentation, voltage glitching, failures and high-stakes attempts with only one chance to get it right.

Hamish Coleman describes reverse engineering the keyboard controller in a Thinkpad and reflashing it with custom firmware. He covers how Lenovo secures its firmware, and his ongoing work on the protocol between the BIOS and the vendor flash tool.

A Ropecon 2019 talk by a lighting designer and a software engineer on how the Odysseus larp spaceship was built, using over ten IT systems, hundreds of lights and dozens of speakers. It covers the lessons learned.

Ang Cui and Jonathan Voris present firmware modification attacks on networked printers at 28c3, showing how HP printers can be compromised and used as footholds for malware inside sensitive networks.

Craig Heffner's Black Hat 2013 talk on exploiting network surveillance cameras, covering how insecure their firmware is. It shows how easily such devices can be compromised.

A 35C3 talk presenting a proof-of-concept SPI bus hardware implant with capabilities like those alleged in the Bloomberg Supermicro story, plus countermeasures for detecting such modchips.

Peter Munch-Ellingsen explains at NimConf 2021 why he wrote his own keyboard firmware in Nim instead of using QMK or Arduino. He shows that the resulting firmware is very small.

Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell present BadUSB at Black Hat 2014, showing that USB controller firmware can be reprogrammed to impersonate other device types. They demonstrate system compromise and a self-replicating USB threat that current defenses cannot detect.

A Curry On talk by Lars Bak, known for V8 and Dart, on building a secure and robust IoT development platform. It discusses language and VM design choices for small devices.