2025 So far...
2025 Update – School, Research, Hamvention, and Beyond
It’s been a packed year, so I wanted to share a quick update on what’s been going on behind the scenes at Hong’s Electronics.
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| I visited the Vintage Tek Museum, in Beaverton, OR, while I was in town for Crowd Supply Teardown |
🎓 Graduate School at Wright State
I’m deep in the Electrical Engineering Master’s program at Wright State University, continuing to build on both academic fundamentals and practical experience:
- Power Electronics with Dr. Kaz: Dr. Marian Kazimierczuk’s courses are as rigorous as they are enlightening. Getting into the weeds of converters, magnetics, and control systems has reshaped how I approach real-world design and analysis. In addition to my M.S. in Electrical Engineering, I’ll also be earning the Power Electronics Graduate Certificate, which reflects the four specialized courses I completed under Dr. Kaz.
- VLSI/Microelectronics with Dr. Saiyu Ren: Under the guidance of my advisor, I’ve been tackling complex topics in digital design and fabrication. These classes are essential to my long-term vision of working across analog, digital, and mixed-signal domains.
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| Dr. Kazimierczuk - Power Electronics II Spring '25 |
🔬 Graduate Research: Nuclear Meets Embedded
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| Setting up instrumentation for a Co-60 Irradiation test (photo credit: Luke Shoen) |
- Digilent ADP5470: This little board has become an indispensable part of my workflow. It’s been great pushing it to the edge in nuclear environments. (Our review)
- LibreVNA: I'm using it for S11-based monitoring—tracking subtle changes in impedance in real time.
- Joulescope: For profiling power and current draw under stress conditions. Precise and incredibly insightful when debugging behavior under radiation exposure.
This work builds on the ideas from the Silicon Reverb project, extending the concept of using impedance and power draw to detect physical changes in silicon.
🎙️ Dayton Hamvention 2025
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| Fun in the sun at the Greene County Fairgrounds |
This year’s Hamvention was a record-breaker, and I was proud to serve as assistant chair of the livestreaming committee. It was an honor to work with such a passionate, capable team—and the response from the community blew us away. We’re already thinking about how to make 2026 even better!
🛠️ Crowd Supply Teardown 2025
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| Got to catch up with Bunnie, who offered valuable advice and encouragement as I head into my PhD journey this fall. |
This summer, I also had the chance to return to Crowd Supply Teardown—my first time attending since 2017! It’s hard to believe it’s been over seven years since I was last there, back when I gave a talk on hardware reverse engineering.
I had some amazing conversations with old and new faces, including Bunnie Huang during a book signing session—his work continues to be a huge source of inspiration.
Portland, OR and the Pacific Northwest in general hold a special place in my heart. The city, the people, and the energy at Teardown remind me a lot of Hackaday Superconference—open, inventive, and packed with brilliant folks pushing open source hardware forward.
The lineup of speakers and projects this year was fantastic, and the venue had that perfect hacker/maker energy. I’ll definitely be back next year.
🧠 Starting PhD in Fall 2025
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| Accepting the "Top Graduate Student 2024 - 2025" award from the Dean of WSU CECS Dr. Darryl Ahner. |
In a major life milestone, I’ll be starting my PhD this fall with a full ride. My focus and research interests will continue along the path of hardware security, mixed-signal reliability, and system monitoring—bringing together everything from radiation studies to real-time diagnostics using modern instrumentation.
As always, thanks for following along. Between school, research, Hamvention, and product testing, it's a wild ride—but it's all in pursuit of building better tools, sharing the process, and hopefully making a small impact on the world of electronics.
Stay tuned for more technical writeups soon!
—Jeremy
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