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Yesterday I recieved “Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering” from BookPool ( 50 cents less than amazon.com’s price ) and finished reading in one sitting. This is the best technical book I have ever read. Wow! an amaging story annotated with political, social issues facing today’s hacker and impact of today’s legal challenges (DMCA and co), on legitimate reverse engineering activities. A must read for all electronics enthusiasts and hackers.

My real encounter with electronics started with “Digital Electronics” class, where I built a 4×1 bit SRAM circuit with standard cmos and 74xx IC’s. Though the circuit is very simple, gave me great confidence. Real fun began with “Advanced Digital Design” Course, where we built a 8-bit microcontroller(µC). I was responsible for overall design, CPU, Debugger(OS for µC) and assembler for our µC’s assembly language. I even wrote a professional looking ( ) manual for final presentation, check it out here. The project also has time & team mangement parts apart from technical aspects. We were required to document every design decision, submit a report every week, finally we were required to submit all the notes we took (including notes on napkins, rough sketches). My teamate Jaison, got a grpahics card (through hole board, all compnents were wirewrapped) from an old computer (from trash). We were required to minimize the cost also (bonus point for least expensive team). we unwrapped and removed all the parts from board and built our µC. That was really fun project.

Pictures of Final product, more here: