1021
Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup
I gave in to my impulses and bought myself a small single board computer to be my power-efficient home server, here's how it went.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
1022
MiniDisc Hacking
Most MiniDisc aficionados are aware of unit hacking to gain access to new features. The unit that perhaps benefits the most from this is the Sony MZ-N510, which also comes in the N520 and NF610 variants. The 2001 model R700 can be hacked to add many features of its upscale brother, the R900 , as well as the Type-R…
1023
The anatomy of a smart bulb
I’ve been having some troubles with Zigbee. Yes, at our airbnb we have a rather big dining room where I’ve put 7 Zigbee RGBWW Smart bulbs. The problem is that each time I try to turn all 7 on or off there’s either a lag or some of them just won’t switch on or off. The controller is a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB dongle, yes…
1024
Eliminating radio interference from Apple charger
Apple's product design teams should do a better job eliminating unwanted radio frequency emissions from their product!
1025
Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)
Homemade clone of the Dick Smith Wizzard/VTech CreatiVision game console.
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How flip-flops are implemented in the Intel 8086 processor
A key concept for a processor is the management of "state", information that persists over time. Much of a computer is built from logic gate...
1028
Rust on Espressif chips
Scott Mabin's blog
1029
Lisp Badge LE
This is a self-contained low-power computer with its own display and keyboard that you can program in uLisp, a version of the high-level language Lisp for microcontrollers:
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1031
Yet another E-Ink weather display – but with Rust
I made one of those e-ink weather displays that you see on tech blogs and hacker news sometimes. It can display the current weather, the temperature and precipitation forecast for the rest of the week, and my current and upcoming tasks from Todoist. It's powered by a couple NiMH AA …
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Tempest: Transmit Radio Waves via a PC Video Card with No Extra Hardware
the quality of the music is not exactly what you are used to :-) but at least it works!
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LLM Falcon 180B Needs 720GB RAM to Run
Yes, if you have enough CPU RAM
1037
Apple fucked us on right to repair (again)
Right to repair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than Apple, a company whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage electronics repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of e-waste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through.
1038
iPhone 15 Pro facts and estimates
A couple of things I learned and one reasonable guess.
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1040
A CD Spectrometer (2006)
A simple spectrometer can be built from a CD and a box. Cut a slit on one side of the box. Place the CD on the other side with about 60 degree angle. Look down into the openning on the box. The slit should not be too wide, otherwise the spectrum lines will be blurred. It should not be too narrow either, otherwise the…
1041
Hacking the Book8088 for better accuracy
The Book8088 is an interesting little machine. It is essentially a 1980's computer in a laptop form factor. With apologies to Sergey Kiselev...
1042
HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin
HDMI is a relatively modern video connector we take for granted on modern PCs and monitors. Now vintage PCs can join in the fun too with a native connection to modern HDMI monitors without any additional adapter. (A production run has been made for this board. You can contact explit[at]mailbox[dot]org if you wish to…
1043
RISC-V SBI and the full boot process
Detailed explanation on how RISC-V boot process works and what role SBI has in the RISC-V software stack. Concrete example with OpenSBI.
1044
I wired up my bike's GPS to order me pizza during a gravel race
As harvest season begins here in the Midwest, I once again celebrate by grinding Nebraska gravel at the Gravel Worlds Long Voyage bike race. As in previous years ( 2021 ) ( 2022 ), I spent more time writing code for a marginally-useful project than I did training. But hey, I finished!
1045
It's My Monitor
This is the first in (maybe) a series of “Tales From Tech Support”, which are true stories from my point of view. I’ll probably only post these on a Friday. In the 1990s, I worked as a contractor for a large, well-established accounting firm. We’d often buy new equipment and unpack it at the helpdesk, throw away all…
1046
If you can use open source, you can build hardware
I'm telling you: we're at a special moment here. The labor savings of open source, the composability, the fun: all of it has come to hardware. You can build things that solve real problems for yourself.
1047
A Test Suite for the Intel 8088
In a previous article, I revealed one of the secrets to MartyPC 's accuracy, hardware validation . To summarize, it is a method of using a m...
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Everything I know about floppy disks
Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic "floppy disks" and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there's a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I've learned so far.