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PIC16C558 magnified 100x

I’ve found this interesting blog by Flylogic Engineering, a company that focuses on hardware security analysis.  In their blog, they examine several popular microcontrollers and other ICs pointing out some interesting details in their design and possible attack vectors.  In their analysis, they take a look at security at the hardware level by extracting the IC die from its package and taking a look at the silicon under a microscope.  They then remove each metalization layer, one at a time, photographing each layer as they make their way down to the lower levels.  I find this fascinating and highly recommend that you take a look.

I thought I’d do a quick post about a project that I found a few days ago, the Toobo embedded linux project.  Vijay is using a TMS-7250 arm based SBC to build an MP3 player using the STA015 mp3 player chip and a graphic LCD display.  I plan on following his progress closely and maybe I’ll build my own Toobo after he’s got something workable.  I’ve also added a link to osembedded.com in my blogroll to the right.

I’ve always been interested in embedded Linux and one of these days I’d love for the chance to sit down and play with it in a bit more detail.  During my internship, I’ve tinkered a bit with porting newer versions of the Linux kernel to a custom Arm SBC and found it to be quite challenging; I was not able to port the latest kernel and ended up going as far as I could by porting the existing kernel patches I had from 2.6.8 to 2.6.12.  After 2.6.12 the differences in organization in the kernel was too much for the same patches to be worked in.

Fireworks that we set off at my lake. My camera’s nightshot mode has a longer aperture time making these look really cool.

Well, it’s official; I am now an adult in the eyes of America (not that it really matters, I’ve been an adult in Canada for quite some time now).
To celebrate, a couple friends and myself went out to my lake with my parents. All in all, fun was had, although we got a bit wet when we decided to do a 5km hike through the rain on our way back to the city. But to be fair, we didn’t know it was going to rain when we started the hike.

Obligatory sunset photo

Read more for a couple more photos.
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