This week I started a new project. In my science class we need to do a science project, and Tanzy Azamzy, Joey Campbell and I, have decided to do research on Electromagnetic Fault injection. We specifically want to know how the shape of the Electromagnetic Field generated effects the probability of sucess for each spot on the chip. I am not an expert on this in the slightest, although I do find it pretty cool, however I am pretty good at mechanical engineering for a Highschooler, so my job at the moment is to make a stepper motor controlled XY stage. This is so that we can accuratly position the microcontroller under the emp tip repeatably, and do testing automatically so we can get a large amount of data. Now this wouldn’t be that hard to buy, as precision stages are widely used in automation, however we are highschoolers that don’t have $10,000 to blow on a science fair project. However we can definitly build one.

I would love to build a fully custom stage from scratch, however thats just not feasable. We need this by january at the latest, so building custom linear slides is out of question. What I have done is buy an XY mirometer actuated stage on Ebay. The plan is to simply directly drive the micrometers With little stepper motors and build a little stand and plate for everything to sit on.

XY Stage
The stage is meant to be manually controlled, and you can buy precision electric actuators that fit, however they are ridiculously expensive.

In the mean time I have been doing a little bit of design work for the motor coupling, however that has been halted as I can’t continue without the stage and the proper measurements from it. Now I have been working a little on getting a testing board for the stepper motors working which has been a little difficult.

Stepper Motor
These are some pretty tiny motors, which is fine as we aren’t moveing anything too heavy, plus the micrometer gearing is so fine that it give lots of mechanical advantage to the motor anyway. I’m not worried.