All Blog Posts

During the pandemic I started a project I long wanted to do, which is to write down many of my lessons learned around building a hardware business. While this has now taken much longer than planned, I’m approaching a (hopeful) end of the draft process over…

Back in 2003, I wrote a guide for AVRFreaks.net about low-cost SMD soldering. I had never mirrored this to my website, but recently needed a more permanent link to it for a PCB introduction lecture. The information may no longer be the most current (22+ years…

At RECON2023 I gave a talk about reverse engineering my Samsung Oven. This blog post has slides & links to information, with more to come! You can get a copy of the slides below: OFLYNN-RECON2023Download Oven-Specific Stuff:…

The first assembly Exciting times—the first assembly! With all the pieces connected together, the engine was running. All the pieces together for the first assembly and run. A little flywheel clearance The flywheel was catching the base—oops. I could have…

Matching the holes The holes in the steam chest and cylinder have to line up so the air passages match. Here you can see the hole opening into the cylinder bore. Checking the alignment of the steam-chest and cylinder passages. Brazing the steam chest I had…

I was able to stain the base and try the parts in place to check how everything would fit. It was not ready for assembly yet, but seeing it on the stained base made the engine feel much more real. Checking the fit on the stained base, before assembly. ← Build…

Making the eccentric and checking the fit Making the eccentric with its offset hole was the big job today. There are now a lot of pieces that need to fit together and move, so I could start trying them together during the build to check that they would…

Things are starting to come together. Today I worked on a few more parts, finishing up the steam chest, including its “entry” plate, and cleaning up the eccentric outer races and a few other little pieces. The collection of parts after work on the steam…

I started on the steam chest, which will sit above the piston. This was just a short day in the shop, so I drilled and honed a few holes. Workshop video Download the video. Workshop footage from February 17, 2023. ← Build timeline · Previous diary · Next…

I finished a few more small parts today, including more bearing tops and the “plunger joint”. The plunger joint forms part of the linkage that converts the piston’s back-and-forth motion into rotation of the crankshaft. The growing collection of parts,…

Trying soldering and brazing More parts today, along with trying some different soldering and brazing processes. The engine uses brazed connections in a few places; one of them is the crankshaft. More parts taking shape, including the crankshaft. Making the…

Starting to look like an engine The two holes visible on the right of the cylinder are the ports for steam—or air, in my case. With the valve directing the flow, they let air enter and leave the cylinder to push the piston in and out. I now had the start of…

Milling the cylinder flat The cylinder needed a flat section milled into it to fit the steam chest. Milling the flat on the cylinder for the steam chest. Making the endcaps I also made the cylinder endcaps on the lathe. The endcaps after turning on the lathe.

A well-marked kit The kit was nicely packed, with the parts clearly labelled so it was easy to see which piece was needed where. It makes a great beginner kit: there is less guessing about the process. The neatly packed, clearly labelled kit. Preparing the…

At the FICHSA Conference ( https://fichsa.sise.bgu.ac.il ) I will be running a short workshop on ChipWhisperer using the ChipWhisperer-Nano. A direct link to a Google Doc with the most up to date information is available here:…

Are you interested in this area of research? If you’ve followed some of my work you know I enjoy a combination of fundamental research & hands-on practical experiences. It led me to co-found NewAE Technology Inc out of my PhD, with the objective of taking…

Just a quick post to have someone with the text. In case you aren’t aware, Nova Scotia’s “Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy” (FOIPOP) system allows you to request various information from the government, including information about yourself.…

If you’ve seen my presentations anytime over the past few years, you’ll know the introduction about “PhD Student at Dalhousie University finishing ‘soon’” has been the claim for the past several years. Finally ‘soon’ actually happened! You can see my complete…

This is just a quick blog post to update you on some rather interesting research that will be coming out led by Eyal Ronen. At Black Hat USA 2016 I did some teardown of the Philips Hue system, and described the possibility of a lightbulb worm. Check this…

At Black Hat 2016 I presented on some reverse engineering of the Philips Hue (also see my other post about getting root on it, which was part of that presentation). If you were at the talk, you would have also seen mention that you'll want to keep your eyes…

This is a quick post to link to slides from my Black Hat USA 2016 work. This work stands directly on the work done by Joffrey Czarny & Raphaël Rigo presented at HardWear.io last year (2015). They discovered the issues w.r.t. the stream-mode cipher being used…

On Friday at 14:15 I’m giving a talk about my open-source power analysis and glitching projected called ChipWhisperer at SEC-T. Here is some useful links if you watched the presentation: PDF of Presentation Slides [4MB] Link to Kickstarter Link to…

On Friday at 1PM I’m giving a talk about my ChipWhisperer. Here is some useful links: PDF of Presentation Slides [8MB] Link to Documentation Link to CW-Lite in Store See information about the entire project at www.ChipWhisperer.com too!

For some time I’ve been planning on updating my website design. Ultimately I want to move towards more blog posts and less static pages, this is the result. This should help showing some of my projects and videos off a little easier. The old site will remain…

I made some additional details in a long YouTube movie: This is far from the first blog post on this, but I wanted to write down exactly what I did to get this working on Windows 7, 64-bit with as little fussing as possible. 1. Buy Silhouette Cameo [NOTE: The…

The majority of the review is available in movie format: I purchased a Rigol DP832 power supply from RAE Electronics (local supplier). I had a chance to play around with it and wanted to leave a bit of a review. To begin, I also bought some useful…

I had entered my side channel analysis project called ChipWhisperer into the Hackaday Prize. I’m honoured to have been selected as one of five finalists! This means lots more work getting everything ready, but should be exciting. Since my last post, I’ve also…

I've been spending some time with a low-cost PicoScope device, and wanted to give a review in case you're looking at one. To begin with, you can check out my Circuit Cellar Articles about selecting a scope. There's also a video version of this: Introducing…

See my presentation at EELive? If so you can download the slides from: http://www.newae.com/files/ThinkFastFPGADesignUsing_OFlynn.pdf And the ISE + Vivado HLS Project from: http://www.newae.com/files/ThinkFast_FPGA_Files.zip. You can also check out additional…

Alright - if you want a copy of my slides from the presentation today, check out http://www.newae.com/files/ATLSECConSlides.pdf

Check it out - my blog post on Circuit Cellar on selecting an oscilloscope is live. It’s full of 4 parts, so check back every week on the CC website for the next part

Since 2001 I’ve used NewAE.com as my personal domain. I’ve decided to instead move my personal content (blog, various wiki articles, etc) to ColinOFlynn.com. Any old links to NewAE.com will work by simply replacing ’newae.com’ with ‘colinoflynn.com’, as I’ve…

If you check out my older blog post, you'll see a very detailed review of the PicoScope 6000 series device. I also had a chance to use a 5000 series device, specifically the 5444. The 5444 is a 4-channel scope with a built-in AWG. The sample rate is up to 1…

Ever wanted to control something from a knobby-looking USB peripheral? In this example I wanted to control the PicoScope software from a bunch of encoders mounted on a USB peripheral:

Interested in a low-cost method of holding a scope probe securely against your PCB board? For this to work you'll need a scope probe with a spring-loaded tip. I came up with this idea since the PS6000 series scope I was using from PicoScope comes with such…

This is an *EXTREMELY* long post, but there is a ton of ground I want to cover. I hope you find it useful if you are seriously considering purchasing an oscilloscope. Looking for a medium-cost scope? There's lots of options out there, and I'm going to…

I wrote for Circuit Cellar in a column titled “Programmable Logic in Practice” from 2013-2015. This column detailed various work around FPGAs. The column later became my “Embedded System Essentials” column, which primarily dealt with security issues in…

This blog post might seem commercial… but I have no connection to TotalPhase. I’ve used their Beagle 480 USB analyser for some time, and before that have used a variety of other solutions (mostly SW-based), so have some idea what other options are out there.…

I’ve got an article in the 25th-Anniversary edition of Circuit Cellar about the future of FPGAs. If you haven’t got an issue yourself yet, check out their webstore.

I’ve got a SASEBO-W board, which has a FPGA & a FT2232H for high-speed USB comms. I was seeing errors on the high-speed USB device, and couldn’t figure out why: Power Split The SASEBO-W is a multi-purpose board including a Xilinx LX150 Spartan 6 FPGA and a…

This is the final product, it can hold a PCB for testing without needing to have soldered any pins to it: And without the PCB mounted: I got parts from ebay seller “pingf123”. Parts used were: “4 Edge Latches for Phototype Test Fixture PCB ICT” “20 Chisel…

I recently bought some Smart Cards from [[http://www.smartcardsource.com/contents/en-ca/d9_JCOP-NXP-cards.html and has some comments/issues getting them up and running. They were NXP JCOP Cards, J2A040. Round 1: GP Shell and Card Personalization I was using…

I’ve been working with Xilinx’s new High Level Synthesis tools built into Vivado. I’m slowly working on posting some more complete tutorials. In the mean-time here is a simple tutorial about making a Finite Impulse Response Filter on a real ADC/DAC board…

When using PySide, a QTabWidget is handy. But the size of the QTabWidget is dictated by the largest item, even if it’s not visible. Let’s assume self.tw is our tab widget. Then add this function: from PySide.QtCore import * from PySide.QtGui import * class…

I recently got an Atmel AtMega163-based smartcard for some side channel experiments, along with a SASEBO-W board. I owe a debt of thanks to Cryptography Research Inc. & Sakura for setting all that up! Anyway I also got a normal smartcard reader, and wanted to…

Revision Control is the most critical part of any project involving files. Otherwise you end up with tons of directories, and naming schemes like "report_final2_june.docx" along with 20 other copies. This is best described in this 20-min clip. Sorry it's a…

Here is an ongoing project: it’s a high-speed ADC combined with some nice input preprocessing (amplifier). It’s all controlled by a FPGA on the Avnet LX9 Microboard, so it just plugs into that. Here is a simple python app (still being improved) to control it:…

For some time I've been using a METCAL soldering station. I picked mine up used on E-Bay, as they are expensive new. They have phenomenal heat transfer ability - they use RF energy to transfer heat right to the tip. It means you can go from soldering a 0402…

I was recently working on a project which needed more gates than I had in my trusty current FPGA Board (Spartan3-200 on DLP-FPGA-HS). I quickly found the Avnet Spartan 6 LX9 board (AES-S6MB-LX9-G), which I could buy for $90 and have here in a few days. It…

Recently I was using an e-book I had access to through my school’s subscription to Springer. They advertised a ‘MyCopy’ service, which gives you a printed copy of the e-book for $25 including shipping http://www.springer.com/mycopy. I couldn’t find a review…

I’ve added a page on Turbo Coding, a subject I’m researching for a class at Dal. This includes a large presentation, links to reference material, and lots of MATLAB code based on CML. It’s still being updated but maybe you’ll find it useful/interesting as…

I recently got an LPCXpresso board, which you can cut and make into a debugger. I wanted to use the 0.1" header (J4) and not the specified JTAG (2x10 0.5") header. Here is how I cut my board such it can be plugged back together: the female header is just half…

I recently got my 34401A bench meter out of storage, and wanted it working with my computer, something I hadn’t done for several years. I forgot to get my ‘official’ Agilent connection cable, but figured I could use my standard cables no problem. This took a…

If you will be in San Diego this coming Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday I encourage you to attend Smart Grid Security West (http://www.smartgridsecuritysummit.com/), where I’ll be discussing some of my work in wireless security. Hope to meet you there! I added a…

In my effort to build the calibration software for my simple Digital Compass, I’ve been working on doing tests with it. Here is a screen-shot of the output (using MATLAB to interface to the serial port), it shows a plot of X & Y magnetic field readings…

I needed to use my AT90USBKEY at higher than 3.3V for ADC input purposes. It’s not documented in the manual, but the schematic shows they anticipated this. You can easily convert the AT90USBKEY to run on 5V with a few changes. The changes needed are: Remove…

TikiWiki has just been upgraded, which might break a few things… let me know if you find any of those!

File not found. FIP has passed IPv6 Ready Silver (Phase 1) testing when operating as a host device. Next up is the router test, then full Gold (Phase 2) testing. See the entry at IPv6 Ready Forum

I presented a paper entitled at a conference in Paris, France this past week. Much to my surprise it was selected as the best paper in the security track! I’ve now posted it online, along with the presentation + notes from Paris. See all the information on my…

I’m still working on finishing uploading & setting up documentation, but I’ve finally put some of a new IPv6 stack online. It’s designed to fit in a variety of applications, including WSN where you might have anything from tiny 8-bit microcontrollers to…

An old project from 2006 was finally uploaded, an IMU using 3 rate gyros & a 3-axis accelerometer. May upload more documentation eventually, but for now all the source is uploaded. Includes using the MLX90609 gyro & LIS3LV02DQ accelerometer. See ProjectIMU

My various electronics projects have been moved from the old site to the new wiki format now

The radiotools for 15dot4-tools has been released. This provides a method of recording/playing back specific 802.15.4 packets. Also site news: added comments on most pages, so if you see issues/improvements feel free to let me know.

As you may have noticed, some small changes to the site! Including this new blog as the main page I’m testing. The ‘articles’ section of the site has finally been uploaded. This also includes my new article in this August’s Circuit Cellar.