One day, I decided I wanted to expand my understanding of cybersecurity on a level closer to the hardware. The best direction seemed to be to start poking the hardware to see what vulnerabilities I might find. That's when I realized, I didn't know much about how the hardwaare was constructed. So I found myway to hackerboxes.com and signed up for their subscription boxes. Each month I get one of their boxes with a new project that requires soldering, programming, and frequent troubleshooting. I still recieve the boxes, but I also purchase my own MCU's and components to experiment with. Soon I hope to move gradute from pre-assembled MCU's to building my own PCBs with integrated circuits. Due to about 5 projects going on when I took the picture of my workbench, it's hard to see what is in there, so here it is:

• Top left: Soldering station
• Top right: Hot air rework station
• Bottom left: bench power supply up to 12v outputs
• Magnetic work area with rubber mat
• Multimeter
• Magnifying lamp
• (hard to see behind the magnifying lamp) filtered exhaust fan
• Flea-scope (oscilloscope, not pictured) built from hackerboxes.com kit
• Digital microscope (personal project, parts on the way)

I have additional tools and components for building charging modules and custom wire harnesses and things of that sort.