Interviews: Ask Andrew "bunnie" Huang About Hardware and Hacking

samzenpus (5) writes Andrew "bunnie" Huang holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering from MIT and is one of the most famous hardware and software hackers in the world. He is a contributing writer for MAKE magazine, and has worked on a number of projects ranging from autonomous robotic submarines to peel-and-stick electronics. We recently covered one of his latest projects, an open source hardware laptop called Novena which features entirely NDA-free components. Bunnie has agreed to take a break from his work and hack away at any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

How do you become a professional hardware hacker

[werepants]

This sounds like multiple questions but it is really just clarification on one:

What advice would you give to a person who wanted to make a living in the "Maker" tradition - being able to spend your days designing, engineering, and building on technically interesting and creative maker projects? I'm most interested in the career aspect, assuming that you've already obtained a preliminary education: would you look for a job with a similarly minded engineering firm, launch a kickstarter, start a hackerspace, hack together some things and try to sell them through a webstore, work as a freelance engineer, or something else entirely?

How do you go about discovering hacks?

[Joe Gillian]

I haven't read your book (I will when I get off work) but I'm curious as to how exactly people discover these hacks. I mean, there's some really weird ones out there that make me question how people even thought to do them, such as hacking a PSP battery into service mode in order to load custom firmware or manually opening a PS2's disc tray to bypass the copy protection that only activated when the button to open or close the DVD drive was pressed. I know with the Xbox, there was a software hack (I don't know if it's the same one you found) with save files from certain games, but only specific versions of those games.

So my question is, how do you go about looking for exploits?