Should I be using something other than the CWNano?

1

I wanted to collect my own trace data and move away from using other people’s datasets. But unfortunately just trying to sequentially go through the tutorials has been way more difficult that I anticipated. Simple things like establishing a serial connection to the board required a revert from 5.52 to 5.50. The traces gathered from SCA101 2_1A are just incorrect and look nothing to what I would expect based on the simulated output. I remove the simpleserial_put(), reflash, and get the WARNING:root:Unexpected start to command: z. Revert Recompile/reflash again, fine. Don’t remove simpleserial_put() but add the A += lines, fine. But looks exactly like the original trace. Check *.hex and the files are indeed different. Interestingly enough, I run the Test_Notebook, and it seems to PASS fine, albeit the Jinja2 seems to raise a warning (assuming that’s overall not a big isseu)

I’m wondering if the framework is designed for the other boards in mind, and CWNano is an afterthought? I guess more directly, if I spent more $ on the higher-level boards, would I not have to deal with so much debugging? Should I be using a specific distro of Linux?

I just want to get traces and study ecc algorithms.

2

Hi,

For the 5.52 vs 5.50 issue, we’ve been making some backend changes and we may have broken some stuff in that update. Apologies for that.

For the traces you’re capturing, can you post what you’re seeing? For the nano especially, you might not see much difference in 2_1A since each instruction only has one samples associated with it, while the Lite/Pro have 4.

Most of the tutorials work with the Nano as well, but keep in mind the Nano has many limitations compared to the Lite (ADC not as nice, amplifier not as nice, limited to one sample/target clock cycle, etc). If you’re running into issues, let us know and we’ll get them fixed up.

For ECC, I’m not sure if microecc will fit onto the target microcontroller. I’m not saying it won’t, as I haven’t checked, but mbedtls RSA doesn’t (though it is close). Just wanted to give you a heads up there.

Alex