My UNIFI AP died, opened it up and pin 3 melted off fully from the POE controller chip... Plus telltale music smoke hole & the TVS diode had split (other side of PCB). Guess it was a bad power surge, oops!

Very east coast problems include unexpected lobster being dropped off and the resulting changing dinner plans.

Men want only one thing and it's disgusting.

A few years ago I started making butter chicken from scratch, and it honestly blew my mind in a way to learn that years of "tomato sauces = Italian" is a boldface Western lie. Even if you use olive oil out of laziness (like I do) it still tastes like a great butter chicken.

I wasn't in the market, but you know after seeing the ad for a $672K tunnel boring machine maybe I just will be.

Magnet wire should be a restricted hacking tool based on the metric of how many attacks it enables.

Squeeeee 🥳 I'll be teaching my Advanced Linux Malware Reverse Engineering class at RE//verse conference in 2026!! MORE Linux APT insides and peculiarities😍🥰🤩Pls share if you can🙃 shop.binary.ninja/products/re-...

A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?

3 days left for our ChipFoundry sponsored TTSKY25b shuttle! We still have 36 early bird dev kits available, so you can tapeout and receive a copy of the ASIC for just €185! Plenty of interesting projects already submitted: app.tinytapeout.com/shuttles/tts...

Made a very simple python-based simulator for working on LCDs using u8g2 (embedded graphics lib). Not well tested & half vibe coded, but so far has been useful and saved a lot of time when it comes to playing around with fonts, spacing, etc. github.com/colinoflynn/... #embeddedguis #u8g2

Katy Perry Releases New Single About Superiority Of Canadian Manufacturing

A little friend swam by me to feed on a floating whale carcass while I'm down by #brierisland volunteering on a lighthouse restoration project. #greatwhite #shark

We also made @wired.com ! www.wired.com/story/fully-...

LPT: Put your dog's face on PCB silkscreens and it might end up in official marketing material for other companies (source: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXI6...).

Currently *not* at BH/DC... While I miss catching up, happily doing things like taking videos of my dog unsuccessfully trying to dry themselves instead of walking around in 42C weather.

Check out FOSSF Silicon at Open Sauce this weekend! We're showing off the FOSS semiconductor design + fabrication ecosystem including a Hacker Fab stepper, tube furnace, Maasi spin coater, prototype devices, and much more! Booth C.18

Not tech, but have taken a few trips out to a place here in #novascotia that has #puffins lately - here were a couple recent shots

Want to go to WOOT and learn about the latest hardware & software attacks? Registrations are now open! If you can't afford traveling ✈️ to Seattle on your own and need financial support for a ticket, apply for a grant until July 7: www.usenix.org/conference/w...

Oops! Broke a tap in a part, a while ago I bought that low cost EDM machine to try out, it works surprisingly well:

Almost 13 years ago we were lucky enough to adopt Luna. Sadly our time to say goodbye is near, but for now we're giving her the ultimate dog days while we still can. To keep the "sad scrolling" all in one place I'll use this thread for photos this week, starting with a cart trip to a little park.

In 2020 I started a pandemic project of writing down lessons learned building @newae.com using a kind of partially-OSHW partially-commercial and no-VC model. This has spun into a book proposal, I've now got a landing page at colinoflynn.com/making-it-sm... as I will be releasing more from this!

I was thinking Mother's Day would be a perfect time for someone to setup a phishing site to collect CC's by claiming last-min mothers day flower delivery. But then you burn yourself, so ideally you subcontract a low quality delivery service and you keep it going. Then I realized this is FTD Flowers.

implemented a high performance ARM JTAG debug probe (for ARM7TDMI) that can do about 1 MB/s of useful bandwidth at 24 MHz TCK, bottlenecking on waiting for core synchronization

April snow..... at least someone here enjoys it in #halifax! Anyone who traveled for #atlseccon I'm sure had a surprise on landing.

Save the date - BlackHoodie will be offering a free reverse engineering training for women by women in Stockholm at @sec-t.bsky.social conference on September 10th! Thanks to the wonderful people of SEC-T ♥️

Finally finished uploading my "Intro to PCB Design" lectures from my class this semester - Part 1 at youtu.be/N544CMR8I-M and rest linked from there. Slides and example project for students to complete at github.com/colinoflynn/... if you want to reuse it! #pcb #pcbdesign #electronics #kicad

Assembled PCB for my newest project just arrived. This should be 10 MHz to at least 8 GHz VNA. Next is powering it on and testing if it works.

Anyone in #Halifax - Thursday March 20th the finale of my ECED3901 "Robot Competition" is happening, see more details at roboheist.com - this year the theme means robots will be defeating RFID readers and cracking safes among other challenges! All day at Sexton Campus (Downtown) #ros2 #robotics

Was able to recover some old test equipment for running an RF chamber which used one of these cursed "put a battery inside the RTC package" devices (M48T86PC1). Eternally grateful for the author posting this guide: github.com/targeted/m48... #repair #retrocomputing

For the past while J-P at @newae.com has been working on a major #ChipWhisperer doc refactor - this is now live, check out chipwhisperer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/in... . It moves software, hardware, and even some tricks/tips all into once place using Jupyter Books. Huge improvement in usability!

OK so after reposting about having too many domains, I did immediately purchase a domain for a 1-off project. I will absolutely never learn (roboheist.com - for my current undergrade course I'm teaching).

Too real.

🎙️Probably my most vulnerable interview yet... Catch Darknet Diaries: Kingpin now on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts!

All Canadian companies sourcing/supplying stuff nowadays. Good luck everyone with #tradewar2025.

Every stick is the right size.

I'm ordering full reel quantities, surely the CT designator that is showing up for a few of them is a mistake, he thought naively.

It was a great honour for me to be on the PhD jury for the one and only @lennert.bsky.social at @cosic.bsky.social this past week. And a very cool building for the reception afterwards, full of various engines (steam, gas, turbine) at @kuleuvenuniversity.bsky.social . Congrats Lennert!

Glad to see we’re able to reach a larger audience! The Chinese version of our book is doing well. @oflynn.com /ht Haisu Lee (our translator)

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Fun day at the office. #smallscaleproduction #smd

Returning to my #RF amplifier experiments... moved from my rough looking proto to a simple PCB. Output filter was built with some parts around so loss is a little higher than it needs to be, but got success @ target of 33dBm output target + sufficiently low 2nd harmonic for now!

I was on Embedded.fm podcast this week, and very much enjoying talking (rambling) about a wide variety of topics with Elecia and Chris

My wife was away a couple weekends ago, so nobody was around to convince me I shouldn't impulse buy a TIG welder. Slow progress but a lot of fun! I also bought a super-cheap one to teardown/compare with the "real brand" one I bought.

Making a breakout board for a small BGA, might only need 2 layers... somehow 2 layers but 3 mil trace/space feels incorrect...

My weekend project of a hacky little RF amplifier (2W @ 162MHz) seems to work! Killed a few MOSFETs along the way as I never bothered heat sinking them for testing (oops) and some other interesting failures. Need to check matching with VNA still, but output power and harmonics get there!

Again super impressed with SendCutSend.com for some metal fab - these are two pieces of powder coated aluminum. Cost of $48/unit in Qty 5 for total custom build. Yes I could talk to a local shop and get it done but I'm a sucker for immediate pricing and not talking to someone...

I wanted a link to an old article I wrote on SMD soldering, finally mirrored it to my website at colinoflynn.com/2025/01/my-2... (link to blog post but it's just another link to the PDF). You can tell it's legit because of the 2002 date code on the ICs in my photos.

Me, deciding to add an "Introduction to PCB Design" to an undergrad class despite having limited lecture time:

In other news, my book has been translated into Korean! 🤩 Absolutely blown away by that. It’s also being the translated into Polish and Chinese. Here’s the link to the Korean translation of “Blue Fox: Arm Assembly Internals and Reverse Engineering”: product.kyobobook.co.kr/detail/S0002...