I appreciate the commitment to putting whatever SPI flash package they can buy down.

Me with LLM coding

For an upcoming talk I built a stand-alone #hardwarehacking tool out of a R-Pi Pico that does Serial + #SPI Dump + #eMMC Dump with a bunch of stuff I wanted. It only needs your browser, and serves the webpage that is the interface from the micro. No internet, no install. github.com/colinoflynn/...

More #welding projects from the other day, circular saw wall storage

Chanced an Eagle flying around the other day, some nice photo ops

It's really absurd how good modern GNSS receivers are. Testing this cheap receiver module that I just roughly soldered to the back of the antenna (including an inductor in the path). It's about 1m from the window where it is on my desk, and it's still getting 8 GPS satellites & 7 BDS satellites.

Annual mark all messages read to get back to inbox zero.

Towards fun topics in teaching computer architecture (this 5 min video on powerpoint as a computer is worth watching: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjx...)

Yes LCSC, that is exactly the sort of ESD clamp device I want.

Lazy #hardwarehacking SPI dumping trick: you can normally use a lower VCC - the processor gets held in reset by the brown-out/reset logic, but still in #SPI operational range. No need to find reset pin/test pad.

Browser based 2D field solver I've been writing for a while is now up. It calculates characteristic impedance and losses for many common and less common transmission lines.

Just me downloading some data from NS government in 2026 where the readme.txt file contains helpful information about the superiority of Windows 3.1 platforms, really capturing the moment here.

Nothing like the great feeling that in 2026 a website still sends you your cleartext password in response to "forget my password".

It's been ~20 years but decided to get back into RC, high integration levels make it easy easier (more fun IMO).

More USB-C fun, this product just uses negotiated input voltage as USB-C PD rating!? I've tested this as a 45W USB-C power supply that allows 20V will let me set a charging current that needs >60W, which then causes the system to reboot as the USB-C PD obviously isn't happy.

Nothing like using a USB-C connector on a device when the cable only works one direction... I know what you did.

7 days into 2026 and already extra-thankful that @matt.godbolt.org Compiler Explorer exists as I prepare various slides/demos from a computer architecture course (on top of my normal use of it in a computer security course). Something so much more engaging about seeing it update live.

Will all these memory shortages affect IoT devices, to the point IoT/embedded developers will care about RAM usage again? If so I really did not expect such a holistic 90s/00s repeat touching all these aspects.

A couple years ago I decided to see what would happen if you just passed what directly over a CPU die instead of the fancy head spreaders. The thermal conductivity of water isn't very good, so you do worse than even a cheap CPU block. I recorded a bunch of stuff with it but never did anything....

I'm finally going down under! Thanks to #Bsides_BNE for making it happen 🦘🤘 events.humanitix.com/joe-grands-h...

Picked up a #welder last year, which has then transitioned into related items... but anyway would recommend, it's a lot of fun! Besides the many useful things you can do, you can also do less useful stuff like this:

Justification for 3D printer: it will make prototyping important projects easier. Reality: But what if I model Sambro lighthouse to turn it into a Christmas tree topper?

The US/EU relationship mender.

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