Edward Farrell
Edward Farrell is a cybersecurity professional, educator, and founder of Mercury Information Security Services. With over a decade of experience spanning penetration testing, incident response, and infrastructure hardening, Edward has presented at leading conferences including AusCERT, CrikeyCon, and various BSides events. His elevation from helpdesk, to role as CEO has, in true dilbert principle style, led to a complete loss of his ability to do any real work.
Session
Ever wanted to build your own circuit board but didn’t know where to start? Me too. This talk is a beginner’s journey into the chaotic, confusing, and surprisingly fun world of PCB design — with plenty of mistakes, a bit of magic smoke, and (depending on how my current design turns up) something working at the end.
I'll walk through the tools I used, lessons I learned (sometimes the hard way), and how this went from a random side project to something I now use to create hands-on training tools for students. Whether you're curious about hardware hacking, want to design your own blinky badge, or just like learning by breaking things — this is a talk for you.
Expect real talk, terrible design, and hopefully a bit of inspiration to build something of your own.