Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 39 posts.
SpaceX's new raptor engine is a methane fueled full flow staged combustion cycle engine and its so hard to develop, no engine like this has ever flown before!Now this topic can be really intimidating so in order to bring the Raptor engine into context, we’re going to do an overview of a few common types of rocket…
Extracting BitLocker keys sealed with a TPM by sniffing the LPC bus
As part two ( see previous attempt ) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking…
A couple years ago, I used an old Thinkpad while my MacBook was being repaired. I enjoyed the experience so much that I ended up getting a Thinkpad X62 (an X61 chassis with modern internals). Last S…
This issue came up recently for a high profile new gadget that has made the transition from Micro-USB to USB-C in its latest version, the…
USB-C offers exciting new capabilities, including external monitors connected through the USB port. USB-C converters to DisplayPort or HDMI are common and inexpensive. USB-C hubs with external monitor support are also common, but understanding their capabilities and limitations can be extremely confusing. Some are…
I’m an embedded systems engineer. I spend a lot of my free time looking for things I could use in future designs, or things that tickle one of my fancies.
A few years ago, Sean ‘xobs’ Cross and I built an open-source laptop, Novena, from the circuit boards up, and shared our designs with the world. I’m a strong proponent of open hardware, because sharing knowledge is sharing power. One thing we didn’t anticipate was how much the press wanted to frame our open hardware…
Like many others, I was quite amazed to learn about a microcontroller sold for only 0.03 USD via the EEVblog last year. How was this possible? Many assumed this was a fire sale of an old product. D…
Posted by John Martinis, Chief Scientist Quantum Hardware and Sergio Boixo, Chief Scientist Quantum Computing Theory, Google AI Quantum Physicist...
Microsoft and Warner Brothers collaborate to store and retrieve the 1978 'Superman' movie on a piece of glass roughly the size of a drink coaster.
We’ve trained a pair of neural networks to solve the Rubik’s Cube with a human-like robot hand. The neural networks are trained entirely in simulation, using the same reinforcement learning code as OpenAI Five paired with a new technique called Automatic Domain Randomization (ADR). The system can handle situations it…
Collection of my projects and hacks.
WebGPU is a new API being developed by Apple and others in the W3C which enables high-performance 3D graphics and data-parallel computation on the Web.
Today I’m going to tell you a sad tale of a device called the Librem 5 and the company behind it, Purism. As of right now, this story does not have a happy ending. I am writing this series of articles as a protest against the behavior of Purism, a company which claims that transparency and openness are their core…
This article is for companies looking to develop MIDI 2.0 products, both software developers and hardware manufacturers. If you are a MIDI user looking for the benefits of MIDI 2.0, [...]
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 6 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook. ]
I want to talk about the Nokia N9 (2011) alarm clock application because it’s a really nice example of thoughtful, functional design – and because it’s only on the N9, so a lot of people won’t have seen it.
In the process of writing a short introduction to RISC-V, we compared RISC-V vector code to SIMD. We were struck by the insidiousness of the SIMD instruction extensions of ARM, MIPS, and x86. We de…
This is one of these things that look very obvious to me, to the point where it seems not worth discussing. However, I've heard the idea that "hardware magically makes things cheap" from several PhDs over the years. So apparently, if you aren't into hardware, it's not obvious at all.
Note: I also posted a separate review of some A2 'Application Performance' class cards, see this post: A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi. As a part-time tinkerer and full-time developer, I have been fascinated by single board computers (SBCs) since the first Raspberry Pi was…
We turned a MacBook into a touchscreen using only $1 of hardware and a little bit of computer vision.
December 2020 Update: Lo and behold, the Pi Foundation tacitly acknowledges the Pi needs a fan in the official case, because now they sell the Case Fan! The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pi 4 announcement blog post touted the Pi 4 as providing "PC-like level of performance for most users". The Foundation even offers a…
This article will discuss the setup steps that are required for recording videos at high frame rates on cheap Raspberry Pi cameras. Frame rates up to 660FPS on the V1 camera and up to 1007 on the V2 camera can be achieved. Filming at these extremely high frame rates on a Raspberry Pi is much more challenging and…
The blog of Tyler Ward (aka scorpia)2019401 points300 commentscited by 3Hardware & Electronics details
The new pi has been released and it has a USB Type-C connector for power however people are finding some chargers are not working with it (notably macbook chargers). Some have speculated that this is due to a manufacturer limitation on the power supplies however it is actually due to the incorrect detection circuitry…
