RALaBarge

I saw this video yesterday -- cool to see it pop up here today.

I also watched this Defcon breakdown on hardware hacking where the presenter goes over the specialized tools to both mount the chips as well as the software to pull firmware at rest to reverse engineer it. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxvpbu9STU4

YouTube channels like My Mate Vince, Northridge Fix, Necroware, and others show folks without any electronics degrees troubleshooting and fixing hardware and I just can't help but want to watch them and think about how fun it would be to get involved...unfortunately I already am at a limit to my hobbies.

The older I get, the more I enjoy thinking about EE topics and wondering where I would be today if I would have found out more about this discipline vs going a more traditional administration/IT route.

_Microft
The projects I mention here are not clones themselves but ever cheaper PCB prototypes and microcontrollers make it a fantastic time to create hardware for old systems (e.g. ISA). Enjoy these examples:

there is PicoGUS [0], a Gravis Ultrasound emulation, a Raspi Pico based PCMCIA WLAN card [1], EDO/FPM RAM modules [2], "Snark Barker", a soundblaster 1.0 clone [3]...

If you want more electronics stuff, I suggest you follow the creators of these on Twitter.

[0] https://github.com/polpo/picogus

[1] https://www.yyzkevin.com/pcmcia-pico-w-card/

[2] https://twitter.com/0xCats/status/1524708654913662977

[3] https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker