Author: Colin O’Flynn
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PicoScope 6000 (6403D) Review & Comparison
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 concentrate on the Picoscope 6000 series for this review,…
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Programmable Logic in Practice
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 embedded systems. The previous domain (programmablelogicinpractice.com) now redirects here. Unfortunately not all posts were transitioned. You can…
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Quit wasting time debugging USB: Using TotalPhase Triggers
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. It’s worth noting that they seem to give free updates…
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Circuit Cellar 25th Anniversary Edition
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.
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Split Ground Plane: Example of failing high-speed signals
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 FTDI FT2232H USB interface. One use of the…
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Bed of Nails Test Bed
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…
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JCOP
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 GPShell for my initial tests, you can download from [[http://sourceforge.net/projects/globalplatform/files/|Here. There is a good [[http://sourceforge.net/p/globalplatform/wiki/Home/|Wiki too. The first test was attempting to…
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Design a FIR Filter in an FPGA in 30 mins using High Level Synthesis
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 .
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QTabWidget in PySide Automatically Resize
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 MainWindow(QMainWindow): def curTabChange(self, index): for i in range(self.tw.count()): if i ==…
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AtMega Card (Funcard) SmartCard Programming & Fuse Setup
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 experiment with programming the card & using it in a…
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Getting started with GIT Revision Control
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 little long, but there is a fair amount to cover: You can download the…
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High-Speed ADC with Variable Gain Amp Input
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…
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Metcal MX-500P Soldering Station Review & Repair
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 capacitor to desoldering an entire SMA…
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Avnet Spartan-6 LX9 Board: Or How ChipScope is your Saviour
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 also comes with a license for SDK for…
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Springer / SpringerLink MyCopy Review
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 of the printing quality anywhere so though I’d post one quickly… The actual copy would…
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Turbo Coding Tutorial
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 well.