@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange even though the giveaway is over, I’ll chime in. At a previous job, I was researching a $2000 commercial 5G base station. We were putting modified firmware on it and I had to do frequent builds. For some reason, it used an “eUSB” drive as its main storage, a flash chip on a tiny board with a USB controller. Taking it out to write to it was a pain, so I made a USB switch with some relays and a hacked up cable that could change the connection from a laptop to the device, controlled by a Raspberry Pi. It worked, was awesome, until after maybe 50 uses the device got stuck in the BIOS and could no longer recognize USB drives. Had my colleagues look at it, no one could figure out why, maybe my cable had a random short briefly? Started over with another device, trying to be extra careful with everything. Again, worked great, then the same thing happened. $4000 later, I just relied on unplugging the drive from then on with the remaining functional device. No one ever could figure out what it was doing to the thing. Also at that job I had an intern who was working on a fault protection relay for the power grid that was for some reason missing a power cable for itself. We checked the other device like it that we had, it just used 120V or 240V AC from the wall. He said the device with missing cable said it could use the same voltage range. I checked his connections but didn’t read the thing myself. Luckily he was the one under the desk plugging it in because if the small explosion had been larger I would have felt really bad putting him in harm’s way. I knew better to be more careful with wall power. Turns out the second device wanted 120V DC, not AC. Lots of wild stuff at that job.