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MICROSCOPE FOR ELECTRONICS REVERSE ENGINEERING

Electronics is getting tinier and my eyes are getting older. To be able to re-use old hardware, sometimes it is necessary to:

• discover the JTAG, SPI, I²C or UART pins on the circuit board, or
• extract and/or reload firmware correctly without damaging the board, or
• check the quality of the connnections of the main processor chips, or
• map the pins of the main processor back to a datasheet, especially with custom ASICs and System-on-Chips (SoCs) being made based on standard designs but by arbitrary vendors.

I saw this post on Twitter, got excited and ordered a full microscope which could do 300X zoom from AliExpress. This took a month to arrive, but was an exciting wait.

The microscope and the stand arrived last Friday, and I assembled it myself. However, it does not have an assembly manual so this post will act as one.