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arabellaflynn · 4 years

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Hello, all. It has been a rough pandemic.

As you may have figured, since I am in the performing arts, I have been completely out of work since this shitshow began. The earliest venues will open up here in MA is September, which is not helpful for me, because I need to be out of my current place by 8/31. No one will rent to me on my Patreon income, so I've been trying to figure out how to supplement that with other online work.

My first thought, frankly, was camming. I'm attractive and I know that, and I don't care about being naked in "public". I have a lot of opinions on the legitimacy and legalization of sex work, but making a statement would be a convenient bonus; I'd be in it for the tips. As the appliance menagerie on the Flintstones used to say, "Eh. It's a living."

The best camera I currently have is attached to the slightly-less ancient laptop. You know, the one with the broken hinge that won't hold the screen up on the right. Only the wifi on that computer has quit working. The onboard chip was always kind of flaky, but for some reason it has chosen now to deteriorate to the point where it no longer acknowledges a router on the other side of the goddamn wall. Shooting in the living room with an ethernet cable is not an option, because another housemate is already doing that.

I bought a dual-band USB wifi adapter with antenna. It's a Realtek chip -- not gold-plated, but also not total junk. I specifically checked to make sure it worked with Ubuntu Bionic before I ordered. I have now installed three separate sets of drivers in three completely different ways, read everything ever written about this on AskUbuntu, and still the computer refuses to acknowledge its existence. Not even if I blacklist the onboard chip to keep it from falling back into previous bad habits.

The other elderly laptop (with the working wifi) has a cam that tops out at 640 x 480, which I suppose might squeak by as a tiny facecam on Twitch, or for tutoring where no one cares about pixelization. The microphone, however, is crap. It's a tinny omni on the screen bezel that likes room noise more than my voice. I don't have an external microphone, and there's no onboard Bluetooth for my wireless headset. So I bought a USB Bluetooth adapter, which this computer is ignoring as hard as the other one is the wifi dongle. I have a wired headset with a mic, but because this computer is probably mere months too old to know what to do with an inline mic on the same jack as the output signal, it doesn't register at all.

The camera on my phone is potato quality, because that is honestly about how much the phone cost. Ditto the refurb Kindle. Neither is smart enough to keep up with streaming video, which I found out when I tried to do a video rehearsal for something months ago.

I have no place to do any kind of professional non-entertainment streaming work (e.g., tutoring) with my terrible equipment in any event. I don't own a desk. If a free desk appeared on my doorstep tomorrow, I would have nowhere to put it. My bedroom is small enough to contravene the Geneva Convention requirements for POW cells and I'm basically stuck in here, for reasons of both air conditioning and not having to interact with a house full of people who very much want me gone.

What I do have is a set of working emulators and some free video editing software, so I decided to take a stab at a subtitled Let's Play. I can certainly ramble on for 30 or so hours of Final Fantasy II. At the very least it'll give me something scheduled to do. So I pulled everything out and set it up, only to find that my controller was "pining for the fjords" -- no lights, no acknowledgement from RetroArch, no response to any button presses.

...

...okay, well, at least we're down to a level of equipment I can afford to replace. So I am waiting for the mail carrier to bring me another $10 gamepad, whilst stuck in bureaucratic hell. I'm down to emergency public assistance, which keeps asking me to send them random documents, inconveniently one at a time. Even when I can submit them online I'm required to wait a minimum of 2-3 business days before a human can look at them. I'm trying to not be mad -- they are clearly horribly overworked -- but it also leaves me with a lot of time to do nothing but busy-wait. They've finally decided I'm destitute enough for food stamps, so now I have to sit on my hands until the card arrives in the mail.

The chronic, crushing lack of resources is not helped by (or helping) the fact that I'm just not functioning very well. I was already on the edge of disintegration when the lockdown orders hit anyway; I was taking every piece of work I could find in an effort to scrape together enough for first/last/deposit on a new apartment, and honestly that's more than I can handle. I can consistently get to about 20 hours of "stuff that can't be done while in bed, wearing pajamas" per week, with occasional spikes up to about 30, before I start losing the ability to take care of myself. I skip showers, let my living space become a complete disaster area, and go to bed without dinner because the whole process of choosing something to eat, preparing it, eating it, and cleaning up after myself is so overwhelming that I just burst into tears and don't do it. I fed the rats twice a day and cleaned their cage once or twice a week, but couldn't manage to do the same for myself.

It's difficult to explain to people the state of being physically and mentally exhausted without also being sweaty and shaky from muscle fatigue. Perhaps the single most salient example I can give is lying in bed at night and realizing I kind of vaguely needed to pee. Not like urgently -- just enough that I knew if I didn't, I'd wake up the next day with an uncomfortably full bladder. Then just lying there anyway, not because I thought suffering was noble or I deserved it or anything idiotic like that, but just because taking care of it would involve standing up, walking into another room, and initiating a new task, and I did not have the capacity to do any of those things.

If you suggest I start making a to-do list, I will sit down right now and invent a brand new Blunt Object Transfer Protocol (botp://) expressly for the purpose of punching you, personally, in the face over the goddamn internet. I will even credit you in the patent application. I will not share the licensing profits, which judging from social media right now, would be approximately all of the money on the face of the Earth. I do not need "life hacks".

What I really need is a case worker, or possibly a babysitter, or just to have shown up at the ER about two months ago, because that is the only way I have ever found to get people to pay attention when I ask for help. Otherwise I get triaged out of sight and out of mind -- they ask if I'm suicidal, I tell them no, they tell me 'okay, here's a prescription for six Xanax and a packet of resources, go home and fix it yourself'. I'm just like, you sons of bitches, do you think I don't know how to Google things? If I could fix this on my own, I wouldn't be talking to you. Except I can't right now, because plague.

Everyone wants to fob me off on someone else. I was referred to an SSDI attorney by a friend, because frankly that's where I'm at right now. I wrote to them, specifically mentioning his name and the associate who helped him, and explained that I was basically a vegetable and I needed help applying for disability. I'm a college-educated suburban white girl, who grew up hearing her parents make rude jokes about welfare queens -- I have no idea how any of this works and I'm so broken I kept losing my place in a blanket whose pattern was literally "knit-purl-knit-purl to end of row; turn work over; repeat". Their response was "Sounds like you need some help applying for SSDI/SSI disability. Here's the website for the Boston Bar Association, good luck!" Crisis lines of both the psychiatric and financial varieties keep directing me to one of two national clearinghouse sites for social support services, both of which direct me to each other, because neither has any programs in my area.

I am trying really, really hard not to resent the ever-loving fuck out of anyone who has any sort of support system right now. One housemate has almost the exact same list of medical problems that I do, and is also completely out of work right now. She is married to the one who has a grown-up salaried WFH IT job, and will never have to worry about having a roof over her head or food in the cabinets. The single housemate has supportive family literally a five minute walk down the street; if she ever gets her feet kicked out from under her, she can stay with them temporarily while she scrambles back up. Another friend yote out to California right before lockdown to stay with his family. A local offered to help me with paperwork, then ghosted me intermittently before explaining that he was having a hard time himself right now and barely had the capacity for his own life. I have an elderly rat, no more savings, and no options.

I don't even know how I'm going to move the little I own. How do you even ask people to do that in the middle of a pandemic? If I don't have the money to move, I definitely don't have the money for a moving company, and I'm envisioning all of my community-minded friends pursing their lips in judgement and declining because like all the good people they are diligently social distancing.

I have also discovered, while hauling an empty suitcase out to Watertown and a full one back home again, that I do not cope well with face masks. It's fine if I'm not doing much, especially if I'm in a climate-controlled space like a store or the T, but as soon as I exert myself at all, I see spots. And no, it is not a matter of "just get used to it"; I have tested this by trying to wear a mask during my home workouts. It is just stuffy enough under there, and there is just enough reduction in air flow, that the world keeps going all film-grainy and dark on the sides, which I know from experience is the first step on a very short path to the Magical Land of Syncope. I had to stop during the outdoor trek and sit on the suitcase about twice a block through the commercial district, where it stayed on because there were people. This was when it was 72 whole degrees out (and the AC is generally on 74°F inside) which doesn't bode well for moving my heavy shit around in late August.

I'm normally good at catching things at the weird-vision stage, although enough random strangers and T employees have asked me if I'm okay that I have to assume I look as ill as I feel at that point. And I have an absolutely tragic talent for talking people out of calling emergency services when I do actually keel over, but everyone is so health-panicked that I don't think it would work right now. I know what's happened and why, but I can't exactly communicate that to bystanders when I'm unconscious. As nice as EMS is, I don't feel like waking up to a round of Twenty Questions ("How many fingers am I holding up? Who's the President? Do you have a seizure disorder?"). So I just don't go out.

Alison over at Ask A Manager got a question about this the other day that suggests this is considered legitimate can't-(always-)wear-a-mask territory, and I am able to wear a mask where required in MA, which is indoors/during interactions with other people when it's actually useful, so I don't have any qualms on the scientific or legal front. I have just never been a good judge of how much potential peril/damage it's "reasonable" to put up with, and I don't have the capacity to explain myself over and over again a million times a day.

I'm fucking tired. I'm tired of covid, I'm tired of living in a big glitzy continent-spanning banana republic, I'm tired of anxiety, I'm tired of other people carping at me to do things I can't in order to fix their anxiety for them, I'm tired of not having the space to dance, I'm tired of asking for help before things fall apart and being told 'well, come back when it is an emergency', and most of all I'm tired of this cycle where I tell myself "I'm going to stop being lazy! I'm going to put on my big-girl pants and wake up early and work 40 hours a week and support myself like an adult!" and then fail at it again because I just do not have the capacity to do that. I do not know how to make the system understand that I need some kind of support right now.

Sorry for yet another depressing update, but that's where I am right now.

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jmichelp · 7 years

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About my “lab”

Welcome to my electronic lab! Over the last few years or so many people asked me about my personal lab, so today I am giving you a virtual tour of it.

We will go over what gear I use and how I set everything up so I can do my experiment efficiently. Along the way I will answer the questions that has been asked about my setup in my various posts. In particular, I will provide a rationale of why I choose one type of hardware versus another. The quantity of hardware described in this post might seems overwhelming but keep in mind here that it took me years to build this lab. I merely add a new piece here and there based of my needs and opportunity.

Disclaimer: I don’t claim my setup is the best but it works for my use-cases: tinkering with electronic, doing security research and repairing various pieces of equipment. If you have suggestions on how to improve it, let me know.

Overall setup

All my equipment is installed on a big and stable desk that I bought from IKEA (BEKANT model). As extra storage room, I used an extra thick shelf from IKEA as well (LACK model). Sadly the brackets (IKEA Ekby Töre model) used to fix the shelf to the desk without drilling are discontinued which prevents me from adding an additional shelf. If you know a place where I can find a similar product let me know.

All units are connected to an Intel NUC Swift Canyon barebone either via Ethernet or via USB when Ethernet is not supported. The NUC has 32GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. This small PC allows me to handle the firmware upgrades, capturing screenshots of the different gears at once, handle the software defined radio (SDR) through its front USB3 port, dump NAND flash memories, etc. And the form factor is just great, leaving most of the space free. The 23” LCD screen is mounted on a Ergotron articulated arm. Again, the rationale here is just to keep the workspace clean.

To avoid damaging the wood of the desk, I put an ESD mat from Vermason. It provides a good protection and also has a standard ESD stud on each corner. I’m using that have a standard ESD wristband and the soldering station is also connected to it. I never felt that ESD protection was mandatory but considering that the mat was the most expensive piece in having the ESD setup done, I thought it was worth buying the few cables required to connect the mat to the ground through a 1M resistor and have the soldering iron properly connected too.

Finally, to provide power to everything on the desk, I am using a huge outlet (thanks to the very efficient form factor of the Swiss power plugs compared to the big fatty European one that I had to use when I was living in France) that provides me not less than 16 plugs!

Soldering, desoldering, and accessories

Of course we couldn’t talk about an electronic lab without starting with soldering and desoldering equipment. No matter what you’re doing, it’s really mandatory to have a soldering iron where you can control the temperature. Otherwise it’s like being a butcher who only uses an axe to cut the meat. I used noname stations for a while but at the end it always ended up the same way: something breaks or you want to change the tip of the iron but the model is discontinued and you cannot find spare parts anymore. So I decided to stay with a known brand and I bought a JBC soldering station. Be careful, it is super expensive. Really! But it is also amazingly good. It heats up almost instantly, I can have up to 4 different irons connected to the control station, I can change the tip of the iron in 2 seconds without burning my fingers. It’s just fantastic and modular but I also acknowledge that not everyone can afford it and may prefer cheaper alternatives such as Weller or Hakko which are very good too. I use a DME-2A control station with 3 tools (and stands):

a T245 iron for general purpose soldering (through hole component, drag soldering SMD, etc.) with tips/cartridges C245-102 (2mm bevel tip), C245-759 (2.4mm chisel) and C245-931 (2.7mm spoon)

a T210 iron for precision soldering with the cartridge C210-019 (0.2mm chisel)

a PA120 micro-tweezers iron with C120-002 (0.2mm tip) which is pretty convenient for soldering or reworking SMD components, especially the small form factors such as 0402 or smaller.

For desoldering, nothing beat a hot air gun. Classically hot air guns are provided in the shape of a big chunky control station with an embedded air pump. I used to have such station but it was big, heavy, the cable transporting the hot air was warm, the air flow was somehow disappointing (ok, it was a noname station so it was definitely not a high end one), and at some point the air pump died. Finally, after seeing a review from Dave Jones (EEVblog), I opted out for the tiny cheap Atten 858D+ station and honestly it just works perfectly well for me. Even if it breaks at some point, it’s nothing but a radial fan in the gun and a heating element in the nozzle. It’s just super easy to service.

One need to protect his lungs because even if we have two, the second one is not there for high availability. So it’s important to have a fume extractor. Nothing fancy here. I just bought an extra filter from the beginning. If you think a fume extractor is not necessary, I encourage you to watch the video from Louis Rossmann on Youtube.

Finally, you will also need some accessories such as a tip cleaner, tweezers, soldering wick, flux, solder, and side cutters. I haven’t put links everywhere because there’s nothing too critical except the diameter of the solder: just be aware that to do very fine pitch soldering, you need to have a very fine diameter solder. Soldering 0.5mm (or less) pitch components is not going to work well with a 2mm diameter solder.

Another accessory that I added recently to my setup is a PCB holder. After having spent quite some time looking on the Internet, I opted for PCBite and it’s really really good. Sturdy, durable, comfortable to use. I even think about buying a second set.

Inspection

As soon as you start soldering SMD, you may want to have a closer look at what you did to ensure that all the solder joint are done correctly. And for that, nothing beats a real optical microscope. You may think that a USB microscope may do the job or that a magnification glass/lamp could be enough. I tried them and they will never provide the same kind of feedback. Using a USB microscope that will show you things on a remote screen is a bit awkward because you’re moving your hands but you’re not looking at them. Maybe it’s just a matter of habit but I didn’t like it. And with the magnification glass, I was lacking the feeling of depth: having both eyes looking through it, it couldn’t reliably tell which hand was on top of the other. So, since the beginning I was using a binocular microscope. But then, with the blog or for publications, I wanted to take pictures of what I was seeing through it. Also on my previous microscope the working distance was pretty small and soldering without having the iron touch the microscope and burn it sometimes implied some uncomfortable positions for my hands. So I recently upgraded that microscope for an AmScope trinocular SM-8TZ-144S-10M. Again, the rationale behind the choice of the articulated arm is that I can push the microscope away when I don’t need it, freeing some space. The trinocular setup allows me to mount a proper Bresser 1080p HD camera on it. I replaced the 10MP camera that was provided because the videos were not as smooth and I would like to be able to shoot some movies of my work in the future. The only disappointment here is that the microscope is not simul-focal. This means that I have to choose between the camera and the left eyepiece; I can’t have both of them at the same time. If I had to rethink that choice, I would definitely go for a simul-focal model. The camera is connected through HDMI (the USB2 output could not sustain full HD resolution at 30fps) to a Magewell XI100DUSB-HDMI capture dongle that sends the feed to the NUC.

Measuring

The oscilloscope is for the electronics what a good debugger is to a developer or a reverse engineer: a must-have. My first digital oscilloscope was a Mixed Signal Oscilloscope (MSO). But I was a bit disappointed of the logic analyzer and honestly I had no use of having both the analog and the digital signals on the same tiny screen. Therefore I changed it to a Rigol DS4034 oscilloscope. There was recently a sale and it came with the full bundle of options (all protocol decoders, advanced trigger options, and a bandwidth upgrade included) for free which makes it actually a Rigol DS4054 with 500MHz bandwidth. It has a very wide screen and while 2 channels would cover most of my need, there are times when 4 channels are necessary. Unfortunately, the software Rigol provides is not the same quality as their scopes: even with a 100Mbit/s Ethernet link, the UI is not fluid at all. It’s enough to make high quality screenshots without using a USB key but it’s unusable to make video or even control your scope in real time actually. An alternative software called Rigol UltraVision Utilities is available for free on the EEVblog forum and is much better than the official software. But the refresh rate is still not enough for good videos so I may consider in the future using the VGA output of the scope and plug it into a USB capture card connected to the NUC.

An oscilloscope is not enough though; you also need multimeters. And yes, I’ve written that in plurals because you may think about having 2 multimeters: one for measuring the current and the other one for the voltage for example. I’m using a Rigol DM3068 bench multimeter. It has a superb accuracy (6½ digits), covers great ranges of measurements and provides 4 terminal measurements if needed for a reasonable price. The only bad thing about it is that the continuity tester is really slow (i.e. the time between you probing a circuit and hearing the multimeter emitting a beep is long). For my second multimeter I chose a handheld model, an Agilent U1273AX which is a really good piece of gear. Of course, as you would expect if you’ve followed my philosophy when it comes to choosing equipment, I also bought the infrared to USB cable to stream the results back to the NUC.

Nowadays most the electronic world and protocols we can see on a given device are digital and to have a closer look at those, we need a logic analyzer. Like many others, I picked a Saleae Logic one, more precisely the Pro 16 model. Pros are that it simply streams the samples to the computer, it does that over USB3, can sample at up to 100MHz, and has an SDK to allow you to write your own decoder. The main drawback for me is that the samples have to be buffered on the computer and only when you stop capturing you can see them on screen and use decoders. I would prefer to have a “real-time” option here. Also the 100MHz sampling frequency can be an issue when the bus you are looking at goes above 50MHz due to Nyquist limit.

Finally, because I also do some electronic repairs, I added to the lab a programmable electronic load. This allows me to easily test power rails which are usually the first thing to fail on a device, by setting constant current, constant voltage, constant resistance or constant power mode. Very handy to test those cheap power adaptors. Mine is a BK Precision 8601, connected to the NUC over USB.

Powering

Should you be experimenting, prototyping or analyzing an equipment, you will need to power the device in a long term, reliable way. And for that you will need a bench power supply. Mine is a Rigol DP832A that I haven’t chosen for it’s cheesy colors on the front panel but for its high precision.

To complement my setup I also added last year an arbitrary waveform function generator, or ArbGen, a Rigol DG1062Z. I kept it with the native 8Mpts memory even though it has physically 16Mpts memory inside and can be unlocked through a software license upgrade. But I’m not using it to generate complex signals at the moment therefore 8Mpts is plenty enough.

Prototyping, debugging, reverse engineering

Another essential piece of equipment that you will need are breadboards. They allow you to quickly prototype something without soldering anything. And to be complete here, you will also need jumper cables here. Personally I bought fairly expensive ones from Schmartboard but they are more durable than the cheap alternatives which tend to break easily. I have an assortment of male-male, male-female and female-female cables.

To easily interface with any device, I also have a bunch of Teensy 3.2. I just love their form factor and they are very powerful: with overclocking, the Teensy 3.2 can go at 96MHz and it embeds a DSP for complex math computation! I also have a RaspberryPi 2.

If you have read my previous articles or if you follow me on Twitter, you should already know that I also have most of the boards derived from the GoodFET project: GoodFET, FaceDancer (USB), GoodThopter (CAN bus) and ApiMote (Zigbee).

I also have a bunch of FTDI development modules such as the FT2232H, FT4232H and UM232H. They can be used to dump NAND memory, quickly interface with serials protocols such as RS232 or RS485 and also act as a fairly fast (~20MHz) JTAG interface that is compatible with OpenOCD. The smaller module even comes in a breadboard-friendly format.

To deal with (E)EPROMs and/or flash memory chips I have a TNM5000 with all the adapters, including the optional TSOP56 for NOR flash that I had to buy separately. I also have a PICkit2 and a PICkit3. The main reason about having both is that the PICkit2 is compatible with Linux. But newer Microchip MCUs require a PICkit3.

When it comes to RFID, I have a Proxmark3 from RiscCorp that I recently upgraded to Proxmark3 RDV2. It comes with much better antennas (sometimes they are a bit too good actually) and in a nicer form factor without the stupid Hirose to USB cable. Also it has a more modern micro-USB plug instead of a mini-USB.

For radio frequency investigations, I have bladeRF x115 since I was part of the Kickstarter campaign with its optional transverter XB-200 for lower frequencies. But that’s not a surprise considering that I am the author and maintainer of the SDRSharp plugin for it.

I also have a bunch of Chipcon/Texas Instrument dongles: CC1111EMK, CC2511EMK and CC2540EMK. They are very handy to quickly deal with some sub-GHz protocol with RFcat or to sniff at Bluetooth LE packets. I also have the complementary Chipcon debugger which allows in conjunction with SmartRF Studio to experiment easily and reflash the dongles with the RFcat firmware (but a GoodFET would have been enough for that purpose).

In order to deal more specifically with Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE protocols, I have an Ubertooth One dongle

I also participated at the crowd funding campaign of Chipwhisperer but I haven’t got the time yet to go through all the documentation and tutorials to use it effectively.

And for more high speed or complex protocols, I have a Terasic Altera Cyclone IV FPGA development kit which allows me through its extensive set of mezzanine boards and GPIOs to interface with pretty much everything provided I spend enough time writing Verilog/VHDL for that.

Conclusion

It makes a quite long article and I hesitated to cut it into several parts but as some choices I made are somehow linked between the categories, I thought it would make more sense to have everything in one single article. I also hope that it will be helpful to some of you and don’t hesitate to tell me in the comments section.

#lab #equipement #oscilloscope #multimeter #soldering #setup #microscope #radio

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