I'm sick of studying pharmacy in college - I can't freely experiment to understand chemical reactions because no one would ever let an undergrad have that power. One night I'm talking to my roommate about switching majors, and he recommends computer science. I think to myself, "I DO spend almost all of my time on my computer anyways... It could be fun learning how it works", so I look at him and tell him that sounds like a good idea. A few months go by and I'm wandering around campus after my intro programming class one day - mormally I would go back to my apartment after my classes, but I saw a post about some clubs being around campus today, and unlike pharmacy, there actually seem to be some pretty interesting computer science majors - and so I wander. I've wandered by a few tech-related clubs, but none of them seem particularly interesting. They mostly just have monthly club meetings, and the goal mostly seems to just be networking rather than doing cool shit. Wait a minute..., why does that club have a plane sitting on it? "Student Aerospace Initiative". I think to myself, "This could be pretty interesting", and so I go and talk to them. Two guys named Zach and Jawad are at the table talking about building the foam plane I'm looking at, and they want to program a feedback control system for it. The best part? They want help because they don't really write software (although I've barely gotten past "Hello World" so I can't say I write software either. I also have no clue what a feedback control system is at this time, but I can already tell I want to get involved with this club...)
I'm going to the engineering lab we work in almost every day, and spending the majority of my day there, learning about arduino, how wires/electricity works, soldering, and a ton of other cool shit. One day while we're working on the feedback controller, I go to the supply closet to grab some wires, and notice something interesting... It looks sort of like a drone, but its nothing like any DJI drone I've ever seen before, almost as if someone built it... Of course I bring the drone out with me and ask if we can fly it, but apparently we didn't have the gear needed to fly it anymore. Since I cant fly it, I HAVE to take it apart and understand it, and so I spent the next few months learning about the components that make up a drone, ultimately wanting to rebuild it. Around that same time, I had discovered the world of CTF and spent my entire weekend trying to attack a website. By the end of that weekend I realized that you have to be able to hack more than just be websites. "All I did was use an input field in a way a developer wouldn't have thought to..." That realization led me to the idea: "I want to build a drone that can hack something." What does that even mean..? What would that look like..? How would I even begin to do that? I'll start answering that in part 2 :^)