Andrew Zonenberg

I never thought I'd be asking this but does anyone have a USB "microscope" to suggest that has a decently long working distance and really small head?

I'm thinking about how I'm going to record/livestream my reworkctf v2 playthrough and the microscope I have on the mill is not set up to record video, and I have no easy path to change that.

So I'm wondering about just adding a second macro/closeup view off to one side looking at the work area and hopefully not in the way of anything else. With the microscope, light, milling column, and dust collection it's already gonna look like the inside of a SEM/FIB chamber, what's one more imaging axis? lol

Every once in a while i hear people talking about work conferences as like mysterious worlds where everyone is a stranger they'll never meet again and I have to wonder just how large their industry is.

Like when I go to HARRIS I know all of the grad students who run the event, the professor leading the research group, I'm expecting to see some of the same vendor sales reps, the same teams from the same European government agencies, etc. The keynote speaker is a former college housemate of mine.

Sure there's turnover but there's a LOT of familiar faces and it's a small community.

Who called the little jump things dolphins do "porpoising" and not "dolphing"

Years ago I had a "ReworkCTF" board with 20-odd PCB layout bugs designed into it on purpose, ranging from backwards LEDs to missing vias under a BGA to inner layer differential pair swaps.

The original board had some design issues that made some of the fixes easier/harder than intended, and also ancient, I think now EOL, parts (a Spartan-3A FPGA - even if not EOL nobody wants to use one of those in 2026).

I'm hoping to do a gen 2 of the challenge soon probably based on a BGA STM32 or Spartan-7 but haven't worked out the specifics yet.

Is anybody interested in contributing challenge concept based on real board bugs you've had?

Also, would folks be interested in me livestreaming a "play through" of some/all of the challenges once I have a board in hand?

Microscope food! Pair of fried FPGAs sent to me for decap.

Gonna sit in the queue for a while until I figure out the best way to handle advanced packaging without too much risk of damage.

I know the Virtex is multiple SLRs on an interposer. Zynq might be monolithic.

Anybody know if ammonium fluoride in a neutral pH environment (i.e. without adding HF or additional acid to effectively form HF in solution from H+ and F- ions) will attack silicon dioxide or nitride at any appreciable rate?

Or more generally, tips on tuning a wet oxide etch to be as non-corrosive as possible to metals (specifically Al and Cu)?