This talk will go over the following: How all of this research got started, the critical vulnerabilities I personally discovered in modern devices, the challenges and failures I personally had with techniques like blind fuzzing, the challenges I had with not having the knowledge or funds to get into hardware hacking, figuring out how to build an exploit for a vulnerability without the need of using UART or a remote debugger, how to get started into hardware hacking once you've exhausted all means on the software side of things, how to build an effective but cheap IoT hacking lab, how to cross compile and disassemble to quickly figure out CPU architectures that a person may be unfamiliar with, discussion of the open source project "Damn Vulnerable Router Firmware", and how to put this all together quickly so everyone can start finding vulnerabilities in the products they own.