I’m Segfault. I’m a hacker, maker, systems engineer, hardware nerd, and occasional bad influence on perfectly functional electronics.
I’ve always been the kind of person who wants to know how things work, which usually means taking them apart, poking at undocumented interfaces, dumping firmware, soldering wires where wires were probably never intended to go, or writing software to make hardware do something its designers never planned for.
A lot of what I work on lives somewhere around embedded systems, wireless networking, RF, reverse engineering, and vintage computers. Sometimes that means designing purpose-built wardriving hardware from scratch. Other times it means spending entirely too much effort convincing a 30-year-old computer to do something ridiculous simply because it might be possible.
I’m also a co-organizer of Hard Hat Brigade (HHB), part of the hacker community that I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time around over the past few years. One of my favorite things about HHB is seeing just how unique everyone’s creations are. Every hat has its own personality and I enjoy listening to the journeys that every maker experienced along the build.
I’ve spoken at hacker, security, and (eww) professional conferences, released hardware and software, documented reverse-engineering work, and contributed whatever weird bits of information I uncover back to the community. This site is where (hopefully) a lot of that ends up: project writeups, tutorials, experiments, things I’ve reverse engineered, and assorted notes from whatever rabbit hole I’ve fallen into lately.
But if there’s one thing I want people to take away from any of this, it’s that you don’t need to be an expert before you start hacking on things.
You don’t need the best tools. You don’t need an expensive lab. You don’t need to understand every part of a system before you touch it, and you definitely don’t need permission to be curious.
Some of the best learning happens when you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing yet.
Grab the tools you have. Find something interesting. Take it apart. Read the datasheet. Probe some pins. Write terrible code. Break something. Fix it. Ask questions. Share what you learned.
Just get out there and hack on things.