Also by Matasano, and tons of fun: https://microcorruption.com
In-browser reverse engineering game.
In-browser reverse engineering game.
I already wrote an emulator for the MSP430 from scratch just to try out an approach for the current challenge's final level.
And now you tell me the next one is going to be pretty intense.
Such as embedded processors, just to use an example that might be exactly the type of people who would find this challenge extra interesting.
Full disclosure: I did several of these, but the browser issue is probably what kept me from doing more. It did not run in my (admittedly outdated) browser of choice, so I had to do some Chrome wrangling, which was the opposite of fun.
Okay, if someone is hardware oriented and has never stepped outside the assembly and C world, then doing it from C isn't particularly convenient - but even with such background I would assume that most embedded processor people would know one of those scripting languages just to automate stuff in their development/testing workflow.
If your point is "that's not helpful for people who don't know how to use HTTP and JSON", I'm at a loss, because the problems Microcorruption wants you to solve are much, much harder than HTTP.