Projects on Colin O'Flynn

Modifying Welding Pedal for a Miller 6-Pin Connector (ArcCaptain Pedal)

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 02:45:53 +0000

I bought a Miller 161 STH welder which has a little hand remote control included, and found it was more difficult to use. I wanted to try a welding pedal but the miller ones are much more expensive than other brands, like ArcCaptain, and I found the ArcCaptain one sturdy enough. This post is how you can adapt other welding pedals to the Miller 6-pin connector. I made a video about the process, this post has the reference material:

MeatBag PnP - Simple Pick-n-Place

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 15:26:28 +0000

Have you ever hand-built a PCB prototype with lots of parts? If so you'll know the annoyance of hand-building something from a big stack of Digi-Key parts. Having to Ctrl-F the part value in the design, and dealing with hits on both top & bottom side. Instead I'm introducing Meat-Bag Pick-n-Place, which helps you the human meatbag become a PnP machine! Here's a photo of it running:

A Low-Cost X-Y Scanner using 3D Printer

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 12:25:52 +0000

This summer, our summer intern Greg d'Eon made a quick project to build a X-Y Scanner from a 3D printer (by 'quick', I mean it took him less than 2 days!). You can see the source code up on GitHub. Anyway, 3D printers are very nice as they have fairly high resolution and fairly low cost. Here's a quick video:

We're using it to measure EM emissions frequencies over a PCB, but you could also use this for side-channel emissions, or fault injection. While the resolution might not be high enough for getting at specific features on a chip surface, it can still be used for general positioning.

Making a USB-HID Keyboard Encoder Board for PicoScope

Sun, 05 Jan 2014 01:46:00 +0000

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:

Making a Simple Scope Probe Holder

Sun, 05 Jan 2014 01:38:00 +0000

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 probes. The end result looks like this:

Bed of Nails Test Bed

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 12:22:00 +0000

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 Spring Loaded Pogo Pin” “spring loaded guide pin for prototype fixture PCB” Here are a few of them spread out: The bottom PCB was drilled & bolts threaded into it (I didn’t have proper taps, but with PCB you are able to thread holes w/o them if you are forceful). The top PCB is drilled to allow the pogo pins to fit through. Getting the height of the pogo pins correct is critical, so this method let me test the height easily. When the height was correct you just screw the bolts through the top PCB to lock it all together. Soldering the pins in one row at a time. Once this was done I soldered the male headers on the bottom side, and put a lot of epoxy on it. Be careful not to get epoxy anywhere that is supposed to move!

High-Speed ADC with Variable Gain Amp Input

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 01:15:00 +0000

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: Still need to measure analog BW to see how my layout stood out…

Compass Circles

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 23:02:00 +0000

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 plotted on X/Y axis. You can see it’s a (fairly) nice circle. The object will be mapping a distorted circle due to iron in the area onto something like that…

FIP is IPv6 Ready

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 23:38:14 +0000

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

FIP - The Flexible IP(v6) Stack

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 20:29:18 +0000

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 full-blown ARM devices deployed. It’s currently not completely usable, but hopefully that will change soon with the upload of a complete example. As well some work by colleagues of mine will show it running as a more complete network, but that will be released as a separate project I think.

Addition of IMU / MLX90609 Code

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 09:58:23 +0000

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