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Parametric CAD in Rust
I keep designing physical parts for our robots. Motor mounts, sensor brackets, wheel hubs. Every time, the workflow is the same: open a GUI CAD program, click a
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
272
Doin' It with a 555: One Chip to Rule Them All
For April First, a guide to replace everything with 555 ICs.
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TSMC Risk
If hyperscalers and chip companies don’t build up a TSMC competitor they are set to forego billions of dollars in revenue and stunt the AI revolution.
274
Sony Data Discman
Let's look at this little gizmo Sony produced in the early 1990s.
275
Two Weeks Until Tapeout
Chronicles of a bad idea. Or how I designed a systolic array with in-silicon debug infrastructure from scratch in under two weeks, and taped it out on Global Foundry 180 nm though a Tiny Tapeout experimental shuttle.
276
Raspberry Pi Drag Race: Pi 1 to Pi 5 – Performance Comparison
Today we're comparing one of each generation of Pi from the Pi 1 to the Pi 5 to see how their performance and specifications have improved.
277
Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
Disclaimer: None of this is written by AI, I’m still a real person writing my own blog like its 1999 I finally figured out how to do Gigabit Ethernet over my existing phone wires. Powerline adapter…
278
80386 Multiplication and Division
When Intel released the 80386 in October 1985, it marked a watershed moment for personal computing. The 386 was the first 32-bit x86 processor, increasing the register width from 16 to 32 bits and vastly expanding the address space compared to its predecessors. This wasn't just an incremental upgrade—it was the…
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Notes on the Intel 8086 processor's arithmetic-logic unit
In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors,...
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PicoPCMCIA – a PCMCIA development board for retro-computing enthusiasts
This is a PCMCIA development board for retro-computing enthusiasts who want to experiment with audio, networking, and expansion on vintage laptops and mobile devices. While ISA users have enjoyed projects like PicoGUS and PicoMEM, PCMCIA users have long been limited to scarce legacy cards with narrow functionality …
281
3D printing my laptop ergonomic setup
Apparently, one of my hobbies is making updates to my ergonomic setup, then blogging about it from an Amtrak train. I've gone and done it again.
282
Notes on Apple's Nano Texture (2025)
2024 Nano Texture Macbook Pro on the left; 2021 Glossy Macbook Pro on the right TLDR: the Nano Texture performs wonderfully anywhere where light used to be a factor and used to force me to shade my screen or avoid the place entirely. I’m less concerned with where I sit indoors. Coffee shops / offices with skylights or…
283
A Year of 3D Printing
If you'd asked me a few years back if I thought I'd buy a 3D printer, I would have said no. My experience of 3D printers back when I was in college was that they were very slow, expensive, frequently failed mid-print, and needed constant calibration...
284
Patching the Wii News Channel to serve local news (2025)
In keeping with my passion (?) for displaying local news articles in unexpected places , I figured it would be a fun project to try and see what it would take to display current local news on the Nintendo Wii console’s News Channel .
285
Conditions in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip's microcode
In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor ...
286
Raspberry Pi's New AI Hat Adds 8GB of RAM for Local LLMs
Today Raspberry Pi launched their new $130 AI HAT+ 2 which includes a Hailo 10H and 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM. With that, the Hailo 10H is capable of running LLMs entirely standalone, freeing the Pi's CPU and system RAM for other tasks. The chip runs at a maximum of 3W, with 40 TOPS of INT8 NPU inference performance in…
287
Edge of Emulation: Game Boy Sewing Machines (2020)
Emulating the unknown: Controlling Sewing Machines with a Game Boy
288
There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's emp...
289
The Z80 Membership Card (2015)
The microcomputer is an incredible, revolutionary invention. Like the electric light, the printing press, and the wheel, it has changed the world. Without microcomputers, the internet, and perhaps even "life as we know it" would not be possible!
290
RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game?
It turns out, you can attach an external GPU to a Raspberry Pi 5. So my natural first question is, can I game on it? Let’s try it out and compare it with some similar computers. Just a quick FTC required note: When you buy through my links, I may earn a commission. For the showdown of crappy gaming computers, we’ll…
291
CPU Counters on Apple Silicon: article + tool
Last time I wrote about profiling in Zig on Apple Silicon, I touched on PMU counter profiling. This time I decided to go further and create my own tool to fetch all available counters for Apple Silicon processors (M1, M2, and later). Brief explanation of PMU counters PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) counters are…
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My Snapdragon Dev Kit was healthy and working fine until a Windows update failed
My personal website and blog
293
The likely cheapest home-made Michelson interferometer
Lately, I’ve been really into 3D printing along with asking myself what we can do with this technology now that it’s become, well, a technology. (At least, in the “this is a thing that can now be used, is robust, and is generally accessible to many people” sense of technology.) The first thing to print on a 3D printer…
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I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it
The Leica G9ii
296
Dell's version of the DGX Spark fixes pain points
Dell sent me two of their GB10 mini workstations to test: In this blog post, I'll cover the base system, just one of the two nodes. Cluster testing is ongoing, and I'll cover things like AI model training and networking more in depth next year, likely with comparisons to the Framework Desktop cluster and Mac Studio…
297
A Beginner's Two-Component Crystal-Style Wi-Fi Detector
Crystal radios are famous for doing something almost magical: picking up broadcast signals with nothing more than a diode, an antenna, and a pair of headphones. They’re the simplest RF receivers yo…
298
Exploring Dithering on Spectra 6-color E-Ink Displays
I have tested the XIAO ePaper DIY Kit (ESP32-S3) – EE04 from Seeed Studio in depth. While its 6-color Spectra 6 display is impressive out of the box, I wanted to see if software could overcome hardware limitations. In this post, I’ll share how I’ve pushed this hardware to its limits by using dithering techniques to…
299
What Happened to Abit Motherboards
Capacitor plague and bad accounting practices were a lethal one-two punch
300
Igniting the GPU: From Kernel Plumbing to 3D Rendering on RISC-V
How I enabled the PowerVR GPU on the TH1520 SoC by writing the missing kernel drivers.