# Research Resources

This folder is reserved for external and internal technical material gathered after the original proof-of-concept phase.

Use it to collect:

- manuals
- vendor specifications
- archived software packages
- vendor contact information
- screenshots or extracts of device information
- protocol notes
- payload descriptions
- decoded and undecoded field mappings
- references to related external projects
- extracted notes derived from external implementations

Suggested rule:

- keep raw source material close to its origin
- keep interpretation notes in Markdown
- prefer small focused notes over large mixed documents

Imported sources can include:

- raw PDFs, DOCX, APK, RAR, and similar archival files
- companion README notes describing provenance, duplicates, hashes, and extraction status

## Folder Roles

- `Manuals/`
  Raw manuals and manual inventory notes.
- `Software/`
  Raw APKs and notes about retained or intentionally skipped software artifacts.
- `Vendor Contacts/`
  Vendor contact documents and extracted contact details.
- `Specifications/`
  Curated product and family-level summaries derived from manuals and software.
- `Payload Notes/`
  Protocol-facing notes, field maps, framing assumptions, and verification targets.
- `Related Projects/`
  External reverse-engineering references that help us compare assumptions.

## Retention Policy

Keep in git:

- source manuals that are directly cited by our notes
- compact software artifacts that are useful for quick inspection
- compact software artifacts that are useful for quick inspection
- extracted Markdown notes that save future reverse-engineering time
- one canonical copy of a duplicated vendor artifact

Do not keep in regular git history by default:

- very large archives that are expensive to clone and not yet central to active work
- desktop software packages that are unlikely to be used in the current app workflow
- duplicate bundles that do not add new information
- generated intermediate files created only during extraction
