361
My fan worked fine, so I gave it WiFi
How I went about creating a concealed modification for a fan so I could control it over WiFi with ESPHome and Home Assistant.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
362
A Lost IBM PC/at Model? Analyzing a Newfound Old Bios
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
363
Things you can do with diodes
Paying homage to the component we usually don't think about.
364
LM8560, the eternal chip from the 1980 years
Site about nature and political themes. Europe, Capitalism, anti-captalism, communism, socialism, animals, cats, veganism, astronomy, religion and more
365
The Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC
The Arduino Uno Q is... a weird board. It's the first product born out of Qualcomm's buyout of Arduino. It's like if you married an Intel CPU, and a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller—oh wait, Radxa's X4 did that. Arduino even tried it before with their old Yún board, which had Linux running on a MIPS CPU, married to…
366
My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4
I have been using a MacBook Pro M4 as my portable computer for the last half a year and wanted to share a few short impressions. As always, I am not a professional laptop reviewer, so in this article you won’t find benchmarks, just subjective thoughts!
367
I made a 10¢ MCU Talk
I taught a 10¢ CH32V003 RISC‑V MCU to talk. By bit-banging PWM as a DAC and using a tiny 2‑bit ADPCM decoder, I squeezed ~6–7 seconds of recognizable audio into 16 KB of flash. Then I went full ret...
368
Why do some radio towers blink?
One day on my drive home, I saw three towers. One of them had a bunch of blinking white lights, another one had red lights that kind of faded in and out, and the third one, well, it wasn't doing anything. I'm lucky to have a radio engineer for a dad, so Dad: why do some towers blink?
369
The AirPods Pro 3 flight problem
Testing Apple’s latest noise-cancelling earbuds at 39,000 feet reveals a potential flaw most users won’t notice, until they fly.
370
How to make a Smith chart
Deriving the basic mathematical properties of the Smith chart from electrical engineering
371
Introduction to reverse-engineering vintage synth firmware
A gentle introduction to reverse-engineering vintage synthesiser ROMs using the Ghidra disassembler.
372
Dosbian: Boot to DOSBox on Raspberry Pi
Android developer, author of Combian 64 and Dosbian
373
Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games
A gauntlet thrown
374
Cheap DIY solar fence design
A year ago I installed a 4 kilowatt solar fence . I'm revisiting it this Sun Day , to share the design, now that I have prooved it out.
375
Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem
NVIDIA sent me a preview unit of their new DGX Spark desktop “AI supercomputer”. I’ve never had hardware to review before! You can consider this my first ever sponsored post …
376
How bad can a $2.97 ADC be?
A tale of suspiciously cheap ADS1115s
377
Comparing the power consumption of a 30 year old refrigerator to a new one
Having a home server and a few smart plugs leads to interesting data points like this one. Well, interesting to me, at least.
378
Sony PlayStation 2 fixing frenzy
Sony PlayStation 2 fixing frenzy - retrohax.net I once wrote a blog post about Nintendo Wii controllers. That post was already based on ...
379
Wasp Blower
Departing wasps always take flight from the small crack under the door sill
380
No I don't want to turn on Windows Backup with One Drive
Microsoft is doing everything in its power to alienate users. When it's not enshittification, it's user hostility. You can't even dismiss forced reminders.
381
Programming in the Sun: A Year with the Daylight Computer
I’ve been hinting on X/Twitter about my use of the Daylight DC-1 as a programming environment, and after about a year of use, it’s time to write about it in longer form. This isn’t a full product review, but rather an experience report on coding in sunlight. It’s also about the Boox Tab Ultra – which has a different…
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ESP32 and Termux
Documenting my journey in trying to use my ESP32 on my phone through Termux
384
I made a small LED panel
I bought a really small 8x8 LED panel a while ago because I have a problem. I just can’t resist a nice WS2812 LED panel, much like I can’t resist an e-ink display. These days I manage to stay sober, but once in a while I’ll see a nice cheap LED panel and fall off the wagon. It has now been thirteen minutes that I have…
385
Resizeable Bar Support on the Raspberry Pi
While not an absolute requirement for modern graphics card support on Linux, Resizeable BAR support makes GPUs go faster, by allowing GPUs to throw data back and forth on the PCIe bus in chunks larger than 256 MB. In January, I opened an issue in the Raspberry Pi Linux repo, Resizable BAR support on Pi 5. Unlike most…
386
Using a laptop as an HDMI monitor for an SBC
Though I spend the majority of my time working with microcontroller class devices, I also have an embarassingly robust collection of single board computers (SBC), including a few different Raspberry Pi models, the BeagleV Starlight Beta (RIP), and more. Typically when setting up these devices for whatever automation…
387
Designing a Low Latency 10G Ethernet Core (2023)
View the code on GitHub
388
Hacking the Humane AI Pin
On February 18, 2025, Humane announced it would be shutting down all services for the always online Humane Ai Pin in ten days, following a sale to HP . I had been vaguely aware of the Ai Pin, definitely more so than the average tech person, as I have a close friend who was one of the earliest adopters and eventually…
389
Synthetic aperture radar autofocus and calibration
3D trajectory position error estimation autofocus, antenna pattern normalization, and polarimetric calibration for drone mounted SAR radar.
390
Putting a dumb weather station on the internet
After all, why not? Why shouldn't I put a dumb Temu weather station on the Internet?