I've tried my hand at hardware hacking a few times only to hit dead ends. Most recently I wanted to dive into a minor security vulnerability and some other oddi

I've tried my hand at hardware hacking a few times only to hit dead ends. Most recently I wanted to dive into a minor security vulnerability and some other oddities I found in the web interface of a cable modem by trying to get OS access. The details were a bit fuzzy, but I easily identified a UART, however sniffing it wasn't giving me much. There didn't ever appear to be a shell and mostly it was just outputting diagnostic info like channel bonding attempts. I couldn't manage to figure it what exactly it was running. Some things pointed to a stripped down Linux, some pointed to a custom OS (including a strange Chinese github repository that was probably less than legal) and some very weeks hints pointed to something like VxWorks, but i don't remember the UART ever given any sort of boot information. I tried to use a bus pirate to dump the flash a few times but always came up with a bad image. On an interesting note, this was the first time I saw a real life MIPS device though. There were also what looked like a few different UARTs but only the one had any data coming off it. Eventually I got a little to liberal poking around with a multimeter and shorted something, killing the device. I'm just really bad with this stuff in general I guess lol. This was just a cheapo cable modem, so if I ever want to pick up again I just have to order a new one of the same model and try to remember the tools. I do have other devices I need to investigate however, that would be expensive or near impossible to replace if I killed them. I'm mildly worried about doing much with those for the time being.