Site-News on Colin O'Flynn

Announcing my "Small Scale Electronics Production" Book

Sun, 11 May 2025 13:09:53 +0000

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 the next couple of months. In combination with my Amp Hour discussion with Chris Gammel, I thought it was a good time to “officially” announce this!

More Research, More Fun - I'm now an Assistant Professor

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 14:52:59 +0000

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 some of the research I was doing and pushing it ever further out into the world. I’m going to be continuing that work as C.T.O., but at the same time taking a leap forward in building up a larger research group under an academic affiliation. I’ve joined Dalhousie University as an assistant professor in the electrical & computer engineering department. This is a bit of a unique position as I’m also going to be helping with some of the new innovation work being done in the “IDEA Building”, which means I’ll be mandated (and thus have time) to work with companies interested in cyber-security (emphasizing the sort of cyberphysical work I do, like IoT and automotive). I’ll be shortly looking for students as well - if you are interested in a MASc or PhD in this area, I’d love to hear from you! Get in touch with my Dalhousie email (COFLYNN - AT - DAL.CA), if you don’t hear back sometimes I’m travelling quite a bit so may be slow, so please follow up to make sure I didn’t drop it. Or say hello at a conference - I’ll be at RECON and Black Hat in the next few months. More details & update on this to come, but it’s an exciting chance for me to continue pushing the fundamental research I love, while engaging the local start-up community and helping encourage students that starting a business out of research isn’t such a bad idea.

PhD Thesis Finally Done

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 12:44:47 +0000

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 thesis entitled “A Framework for Embedded Hardware Security Analysis” on the DalSpace website. It’s been a ton of fun doing the PhD, and I’ve had a lot of help over the years which I’ve very grateful for. For the foreseeable future I’ll be continuing to spin up NewAE Technology Inc., and keeping my ChipWhisperer project alive.

New Site Layout Live

Tue, 30 Dec 2014 01:24:26 +0000

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 accessible at https://colinoflynn.com/oldsite as I haven’t migrated everything. In addition this means old links can easily be fixed by inserting ‘oldsite’ into them! I.e. if you have a link to https://colinoflynn.com/tiki-index.php?page=15dot4tools, just change it to https://colinoflynn.com/oldsite/tiki-index.php?page=15dot4tools and everything works! Let me know if anything breaks though, but in the mean-time I’ll be slowly trying to migrate additional content.

Hackaday Project and Latest Circuit Cellar Columns

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 23:33:00 +0000

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 published a few more columns in Circuit Cellar. If you aren’t familiar with my Programmable Logic in Practice column, I post some details of it on my dedicated website. I just posted a video for the Dec 2014 column which includes some experiments with metastability on the Xilinx FPGA. Fun times!

Splitting of NewAE & ColinOflynn.com

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 01:35:00 +0000

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 mirrored all (I think) the content. In the mean-time there will be a redirection page to inform you that NewAE.com will contain mostly some products I’m involved with, and instead you should head to ColinOFlynn.com for the old content.

Meet me Live, Site Updates, and Book Updates

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 23:05:00 +0000

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 link to one of my big new projects, a book about all these wireless networks. It’s called “IPv6 for the (Wireless) Masses”, and I hope the playful title will make you to believe that perhaps it will offer more than just regurgitated standards and information you can find elsewhere with a bit of Googling.

TikiWiki Upgrade

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:44:00 +0000

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

Moving electronics projects from old site

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:14:45 +0000

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

Articles Posted

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 16:45:35 +0000

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.