Hello!

A couple months back I was introduced to the concept of hardware hacking. It seemed like a really interesting area to dive into, so at Anna’s suggestion I decided to start by attempting to reverse engineer an old router, with the goal of getting the program memory off of the device, and eventually reverse engineering the firmware itself. After searching online, I found an old Netgear RP614 for sale. Still in the plastic wrap too! ...

Towards the end of last October I set out to design an analog IC. I figured a good first step in that process (given I knew nothing about analog design) would be to go through a textbook dedicated to the subject, namely Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits by Behzad Razavi. Problem was, I was on a time crunch and this book is designed to take an entire semester in a first year graduate course. Still I figured at 13 pages a day, it would be feasible to get through it in 2 months, leaving me 3 months before the deadline for design submission. ...

I’m currently pursuing my undergrad in electrical engineering, and I’ve been trying to explore niches that appeal to me so I can figure out what exactly I want to do with my career. One area that’s currently got my interest is analog IC design. It seems like it could offer the type of low abstraction problem solving I tend to like. Unfortunately it’s pretty inaccessible. Most people don’t get to make an IC (AKA ‘tape out’) until they’re in a graduate program pursuing their masters or PHD. That’s a couple years away for me, and I don’t want to wait that long. So I’m gonna make one now. ...

Why Make This? A couple of months back I decided to try making an analog function generator. My requirements were pretty loose, I just wanted to see if I could generate some square, triangle, and sine waves. Additionally, I wanted to be able to adjust the frequency and amplitude of the waves generated. This actually turned out to be pretty easy, only taking three op-amps. ...