mytechnotalent/Embedded-Hacking is a free, continuously updated step-by-step course that takes learners from bare-metal embedded development on the RP2350 through firmware debugging and reverse engineering, strictly within their own lab hardware.
| Tool | mytechnotalent/Embedded-Hacking — free comprehensive embedded hacking course spanning embedded software development to reverse engineering |
| Category | Educational curriculum / embedded security training |
| Primary Use | Learning embedded development, GDB debugging, Ghidra and Binary Ninja reverse engineering, and peripheral work on the RP2350 using owned lab hardware |
| Safe Use | The README's legal disclaimer restricts all material to educational, research, and defensive purposes on devices you own 100% or have documented authorization to test; this is a self-study lab course, not an attack toolkit |
| Telemetry Note | Purely educational content — no network implants or C2 components; its labs run entirely on the learner's own breadboard, leaving no footprint on third-party infrastructure |
mytechnotalent/Embedded-Hacking is a free, Apache-2.0 licensed educational repository by the author of the well-known Reverse-Engineering self-study course, and it applies the same pedagogical model to the embedded world. Rather than shipping a tool you run against a target, it ships a structured curriculum — currently at lesson 353, with a November 11, 2026 tutorial covering AVR assembly and Timer1 CTC mode for tone generation on a passive buzzer — that walks a student from blinking an LED on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 all the way to reverse engineering firmware with Ghidra and Binary Ninja. At around 218 stars and written primarily in C, it is an active, frequently updated project rather than an abandoned syllabus, and the pace of daily lessons suggests sustained authorial investment.
The course is unapologetically hardware-centric. The required kit revolves around a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and the official Raspberry Pi Debug Probe, plus a long list of peripherals: a 1602 LCD with a PCF8574 I2C backpack, a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor, an SG90 servo, a VS1838B IR receiver with an NEC-compatible remote, a u-blox NEO-6M GPS module, and a pair of REYAX RYLR998 868/915 MHz LoRa transceivers. That last item is notable — LoRa appears twice, one module on the Pico and one on the host computer, implying the course eventually covers long-range low-power radio communication and likely its security properties, all on hardware the student owns.
The repository also includes a complete reference library: a free downloadable textbook as a PDF, a Fritzing project file, breadboard diagrams, a Pico 2 pinout, and debug probe wiring schematics. Most impressively, it bundles the full RP2350 datasheet — 1,380 pages — alongside structured notes on the silicon. The README summarizes the dual Cortex-M33/Hazard3 RISC-V architecture, the 520 kB of on-chip SRAM striped across ten banks, 8 kB of OTP storage, and a memory map that places external XIP flash at 0x10000000, SRAM at 0x20000000, peripherals at 0x40000000, and single-cycle I/O at 0xd0000000, with register-level detail for all 52 peripherals.
That datasheet commentary is not decoration; it is the foundation of the reverse engineering methodology the course teaches. Understanding the physical address map of the RP2350, the IO_BANK0 FUNCSEL pin multiplexing, and PADS_BANK0 electrical configuration is exactly the knowledge an analyst needs when reading disassembly and reasoning about what a peripheral access at a given address actually does. The course's stated skill prerequisites reinforce this: intermediate C with a firm grasp of pointers (used for what the author calls live variable hijacking), bare-metal ARM assembly, register and stack mechanics, CLI proficiency for OpenOCD and GDB, and hands-on breadboarding ability.
The development environment is deliberately modern and cross-platform. Everything installs natively on Windows, macOS Apple Silicon, and Linux x64 with no virtual machine required, and the bulk of the toolchain — the Pico SDK, the full Arm GNU toolchain including arm-none-eabi-gcc, arm-none-eabi-gdb, arm-none-eabi-nm, and objdump, plus picotool and OpenOCD — arrives via the Raspberry Pi Pico VS Code extension under ~/.pico-sdk. On top of that, students add Ghidra (with Eclipse Temurin JDK 21), Binary Ninja Personal, and a serial monitor such as PuTTY, screen, or minicom. The Apple Silicon notes are unusually careful, warning that an Intel Homebrew shadowing /opt/homebrew produces debugger failures that masquerade as bugs and should not be worked around with Rosetta.
A representative build flows through CMake and Ninja with -DPICO_BOARD=pico2 -DPICO_PLATFORM=rp2350, and flashing happens over the Debug Probe using SWD via the program <bin> 0x10000000 verify reset exit pattern — no BOOTSEL button, no UF2 files. That choice matters pedagogically: SWD-based flashing with OpenOCD is the same workflow a professional uses when attaching a debugger to real embedded targets in a lab, and it normalizes the probe-driven workflow from lesson one rather than treating debugging as an advanced afterthought. The README also documents the fallback of passing -DPICO_SDK_PATH and -DPICO_TOOLCHAIN_PATH explicitly when the extension-managed paths are not detected, which is the most common first-week stumbling block for students.
Where this repository fits in an authorized workflow is straightforward: it is a training asset for engineers and security professionals who want genuine hardware-level competence. Firmware analysts, IoT security consultants, and ICS practitioners — the topic tags include industrial-control-system, iot-security, and scata — all benefit from a curriculum that forces the student to write the C, read the assembly, drive GDB against a live MCU, and cross-reference a real datasheet. The companion Reverse-Engineering course by the same author is explicitly cross-linked, suggesting the two form a combined software-plus-firmware learning path.
The governance side of the repository is unusually explicit for an educational project. The README opens with a bold legal disclaimer stating the material is strictly for educational, research, and defensive purposes, and prohibiting use against any device, network, or system the user does not own 100% or lack documented, legally binding authorization to test. This framing matches how the course actually operates: every experiment executes on a breadboard the student built, so there is no attack surface belonging to anyone else involved at any point in the curriculum.
For defenders, the value is indirect but real. Anyone responsible for embedded or IoT product security benefits from understanding how firmware is developed, flashed over SWD, and analyzed in Ghidra — the same literacy needed to review vendor firmware, triage hardware-assisted vulnerabilities, and evaluate the debug interfaces (SWD, JTAG, UART via FT232RL) that shipping products so often leave exposed. The course's use of an FT232RL USB-to-TTL adapter and serial consoles at 115200 baud mirrors the first interaction most hardware assessments have with a target device.
Criticisms are minor. The hardware bill is nontrivial — a dozen components including two LoRa modules and a GPS receiver — though all are inexpensive hobbyist parts. The README is long and front-loads setup, which can obscure the lesson index itself. And the daily-lesson cadence means the curriculum is a living document rather than a fixed course, which some learners may find disorienting. None of this detracts from what is one of the most complete free embedded security curricula available, built entirely around owned hardware, free and open tooling, and a legal posture that keeps every exercise firmly in authorized territory.
mytechnotalent/Embedded-Hacking.Educational analysis for authorized security professionals. Use only in controlled, authorized environments.
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