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The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
To use the Montreal subway (the Métro), you tap a paper ticket against the turnstile and it opens. The ticket works through a system called ...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
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Hacking eInk Price Tags (2021)
Dmitry.GR: Wireless picture frames that run for years on batteries
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Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre
The Atari 520ST was released in the US in July 1985, but because Atari did not provide magazines with pre-production models (like Commodore did with the Amiga), it took a while before magazine reviews appeared.
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1/25-scale Cray C90 wristwatch
Welcome to the latest edition of my on-going series in Cray-related computational necromancy. This was another just-for-fun project. Over the many years Andras and I have been working on our Cray revival efforts, there has always been a big lag between our available software (and Andras’ amazing simulator ) and my…
785
Agilent 2000a / 3000a Oscilloscope NAND Recovery
As a resident member of the EEVblog Test Equipment Anonymous support group, I have picked up my fair share of old test equipment boat anchors, but my knees buckle at broken recently manufactured oscilloscopes in the sub $200 range. In this case, the Agilent / Keysight Infiniivision X-series oscilloscopes have been an…
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Two ways to use an LED as a light sensor with Arduino
I needed to log when a light switched on and off during the night as part of debugging an oddly behaving movement sensor. To do that I built...
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Spur – RISC IV: The Lisp Multiprocessor Workstation
The hugely ambitious 'Symbolic Processing Using RISC' project from UC Berkeley
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FPGA-Based Disk Controller for the Apple II (2017)
Apple II disk controller cards are weird, there are a crazy number of different types , and many are rare and expensive. Can an FPGA-based solution save the day for retro collectors? You bet! Nearly all the existing disk controllers connect the same 8-bit bus to the same 19-pin disk interface, so a universal clone is…
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They make USB-C cables with displays now
How to turn something as ordinary as an USB-C cable into something that a lot of nerds will want to buy.
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MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5
This all started from a conversation about the RP2040 MCU, and building a simple desktop/GUI for it. I’d made a comment along the lines of “or, just run some old OS”, and it got me thinking about the original Macintosh .
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First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini
I've owned Starlink Mini for about 6 months, using it for camping, backup internet, and in motion inside my car. Here is my honest review.
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The Raspberry Pi 5 Is No Match for a Tini-Mini-Micro PC
I've always been fond of the idea of the Raspberry Pi. An energy efficient, small, cheap but capable computer. An ideal home server. Until the Pi 4, the Pi was not that capable, and only with the relatively recent Pi 5 (fall 2023) do I feel the Pi is OK performance wise, although still hampered by SD card performance…
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An interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su about solving hard problems
An interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su about her path to AMD, turning around the chip maker, the AI opportunity, and competing with Nvidia.
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Reverse engineering a restaurant pager system
Let's reverse engineer a restaurant pager system I bought off the internet!
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Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo
In the past months, Tesla has been offering a free, one-month trial of their full self-driving (FSD) system to all current owners. It looks like they are rolling this out in stages, because I only got mine only a few days ago.
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I like the RP2040
The RP2040 is a microcontroller made by Raspberry Pi. Unlike their more widely known products, the RP2040 is meant to be embedded in consumer electronics. It's cheap and available in tens of thousands for immediate dispatch from your local Mouser.
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SIMD < SIMT < SMT: Parallelism in Nvidia GPUs (2011)
Programmable NVIDIA GPUs are very inspiring to hardware geeks, proving that processors with an original, incompatible programming model can become widely used.
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Designing a Lego orrery
Designing a Lego orrery - Personal blog about game development, programming and making
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I built an ROV to solve missing person cases
Introduction
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Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked
What follows is the story of how I fixed not one, but two, different flawed Altera USB Blaster clone devices that never worked correctly after I bought them.
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Yes, you can play Duck Hunt without a television (but I can't)
Duck Hunt is considered a classic of the Nintendo Entertainment System. But surprisingly, the concept of hunting ducks did not originate in 1984– people have...
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Alarms in medical equipment
ISO/IEC 60601-1-8, Patterson and other alarms in medical equipment Sample Alarm Sounds - Sirens, buzzers and other sounds
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TPM GPIO fail: How bad OEM firmware ruins Intel TPM security
In this article I demonstrate a software only attack that allows an operating system to set the PCRs of a discrete TPM device to arbitrary values and unseal any secret that uses a PCR based sealing policy (such as disk encryption keys used by unattended unlock TPM FDE schemes).
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PSA: If you're a fan of ATmega, try AVR Dx
A little-known offshoot of the ATmega series of 8-bit microcontrollers is better, faster, and cheaper than its progenitor.
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Making USB devices – end to end guide to your first gadget
Introduction to implementing USB devices. Minimal overview of hardware and software with an example with STM32 microcontroller. Also contains an index to very detailed guides for more information.
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Formlabs Form 4 Teardown
Formlabs has recently launched the fourth edition of their flagship SLA printer line, the Form 4 . Of course, I jumped on the chance to do a teardown of the printer; I’m grateful that I was able to do the same for the Form 1 , Form 2 , and Form 3 generations. In addition to learning a lot from the process of tearing…
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Upgrading my Chumby 8 kernel part 10: RTC
I’m going to start this post off with the obligatory list of links to the previous parts in the series if you’re new here and are interested in seeing the full story: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , and 9 . This is the tale of how I upgraded my Chumby 8 to run a modern Linux kernel.
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SPI Flash
SPI Flash reader built from a Teensy or Arduino