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About hackagadget.net

Welcome to hackagadget.net — an open-source technical lab notebook and engineering repository maintained by Stephen J. Kiernan.

This site serves as a public knowledge base documenting hands-on projects, hardware teardowns, security vulnerabilities, kernel internals, and custom software utilities.

Core Focus Areas

  • Software Engineering

    Designing robust open-source tools, system utilities, and operating system components with a focus on C, Python, Go, and FreeBSD kernel development.

  • Hardware Hacking

    Reverse engineering embedded systems, capturing bus traffic with logic analyzers, auditing PCB traces, and interacting with JTAG, SWD, UART, and I2C interfaces.

  • Security Research

    Vulnerability research on IoT microcontrollers, connected appliances, BLE/MQTT communication protocols, and Android companion applications.

  • Courses & Writeups

    Step-by-step educational guides, vulnerability advisories, protocol specifications, and architectural deep-dives for fellow engineers and researchers.

Lab Equipment & Environment

Research and development are conducted in a dedicated hardware engineering laboratory equipped for circuit analysis, micro-probing, and firmware extraction:

  • Signal Analysis: Digital storage oscilloscopes and logic analyzers.
  • Hardware Interfacing: JTAG and SWD debug probes, USB-to-UART serial adapters, multi-protocol bus interfaces, and IC Flash programmers.
  • Operating Systems & Environments: FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, Windows, and embedded real-time operating systems (RTOS).

Licensing & Open Source Philosophy

All research, utility scripts, documentation hooks, and code written for hackagadget.net are published under permissive open-source licenses or dedicated directly to the public domain.

You can explore public projects and repositories on GitHub.