Category: Electronics & Production
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My 2003 Low Cost SMD Soldering Guide
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 later!), but I wanted to keep an official mirror…
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Intel LGA1700 (12th/13th gen, i9 3900k) Top Resistors/Capacitors
If you’re a bit careless with your CPU (especially if e.g., delidding it) you can knock these resistors off the topside. From measuring a known-good device (but without removing them) I measured the following values as a reference:
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Analog Discover Pro Teardown
NOTE: This was going to be a twitter thread but twitter was down? So this is a lazy blog post… Anyone used to Digilent would expect this to be based on Zynq or similar – the fact the device has USB + ethernet ports makes it a pretty much sure thing! Taking the screws off…
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MeatBag PnP – Simple Pick-n-Place
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…
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A Low-Cost X-Y Scanner using 3D Printer
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…
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Low-Cost SMD Soldering Setup
The following blog post shows some details of my SMD soldering process. This was based on a larger video I did (linked below) showing the entire soldering process. Video of Soldering Setup The following shows me soldering a complete board with BGA device. Equipment Used In the above video, there are several pieces of equipment…
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ESC SV 2015 – USSSSSB: Talking USB From Python
At ESC 2015 SV I gave a talk on using USB From Python, see the talk description here. This blog post is serving as a placeholder to allow me to update links to software used during the live demo. For SuperCon 2015, there is a Project Page with these details too. You can also ask…
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Experiments with Seek Thermal Camera
A while back I got a Seek thermal camera, as I wanted to use it for measuring electronics component temperatures. As part of a course I’m teaching at Dal, I did a few experiments I wanted to post here. These photos were taken with a macro lense, shown here: To get that lens, I purchased…
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USB Inrush Testing
The USB spec has limits on the ‘inrush current’, which is designed to prevent you from having 2000uF of capacitance that must be suddenly charged when your board is plugged into the USB port. The limit works out to around 10uF of capacitance . Your board might have much much more – so you’ll have…
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Driver Signing Notes
I recently wanted to sign some drivers to avoid requiring users of my ChipWhisperer device to do the usual bypass-signature deal. The end result is a sweet sweet screen like this when install the drivers: If you are in this situation, I wanted to add some of my own notes into the mix. David Grayson…
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SMD Solder Paste Stencil Creation with Silhouette Cameo
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 v1 I used is no…
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Hackaday Project and Latest Circuit Cellar Columns
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…
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EELive! (ESC) Conference Slides + Programs
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 details at the Programmable Logic in Practice post, which includes videos + examples of other uses of HLS.
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Selecting an Oscilloscope
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
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Making a USB-HID Keyboard Encoder Board for PicoScope
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:
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Making a Simple Scope Probe Holder
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:
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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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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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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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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.