The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
If you take someone with intermediate knowledge of computing in the right areas, and ask them how an x86 machine boots, they'll probably start telling you about how the CPU first comes up in real mode and starts executing code from the 8086 reset vector of FFFF:FFF0. This understanding of how an x86 machine boots has…
The physical data format on a Commodore 1541 5¼-inch floppy disk as used by the C64 is completely defined in software. The drive’s operating system fits 170 KB on a disk. This article explores different strategies, each with its pros and cons, to fit up to 246 KB.
After viewing our CGA Redux livestream a friendly tinkerer named Arek contacted me if I was interested in a homebrew Hercules Graphics Card PCB that he designed. Naturally I said yes and assembled the card, playing beta tester for his design. It will probably be open sourced eventually, but is not yet available. So…
I’d like to share with you my latest project: Decktility!
In another thrilling adventure with ChatGPT, I endeavored to integrate it with a Raspberry Pi, effectively turning it into my own personal light switch. My custom ChatGPT plugin, sporting just two ...
I was wondering what the IBM Personal Computer would have been like if they had chosen the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8088, so I used my MCL86+ to emulate the 68000 and find out! The MCL86…
I have set up an electronics lab bench for all my hobby and product development projects. In this article, I will dive deep into every part of the setup and guide you through the structure, organiz…
Two systems I know pretty well, Apache BookKeeper and Apache Kafka, were designed in the era of the spinning disk, the hard-drive or HDD. Hard-drives are good at sequential IO but not so good at random IO because of the relatively high seek times. No wonder then that both Kafka and BookKeeper were d
Request to Google : ungrey the “OEM unlocking” toggle in the factory, before shipping store.google.com devices to customers. Do not make your customers connect the device to the Internet before they are allowed to install the operating system they want.
In a fun-filled deep dive into a Philip's Hue Color light bulb, I disassembled, analyzed, and ultimately restored it to working order. Over the course of the hack, I dismantled the bulb’s interior,...
The objective for this project was to implement a UDP transmitter for use on the RP2040 that would consume zero CPU time. The system described on this webpage is implemented with 3 PIO state machines, 12 DMA channels, and 1 PWM channel. It generates an NLP, performs packet checksum calculations, and performs packet…
In the very beginning, there was … well, this thing. The OKTO35 Mk1. A machine that could (barely) shoot and scan its own 35mm film movies.
The goal here is to grab power from external battery packs of varying voltages and supply power to 'desktop replacement' sized laptops. This same topology can be used for Dell barrel jack systems.
I wanted to get a music streaming server running as I have in the past but with the scarcity of RasberryPi’s my I needed to try something new. I had a Samsung Galaxy S7 that had been taking up space in my junk drawer and this post is my journey to give it a new task.
We generally know that when we buy a piece of technology that it will not last forever, connectors wear out and/or go out of fashion. But I think the most frustrating reason to have to get rid of something is that drivers stop being made for devices.
How I received the signal of MANY satellites with an RTL-SDR V3
I like Sun Ray laptops. They make surprisingly useful thin clients. Here, going from right to left, I'm playing Quake on my Solaris UltraBoo...
A while ago, our little one was born. As unfortunately her (great-)grandparents are located somewhat spread out over the globe, real-life visits can't happen too often. Obviously, video calling is a thing nowadays, so we keep in contact. Still, I wanted everyone to also be able to see her when we weren't online…
I partnered up with Mirek (of Mirkotronics / @Mirko_DIY on Twitter) to build the Pi4GPU (or 'PiG' for short): This journey started almost three years ago: almost immediately after the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was launched, I started testing graphics cards on it. First I tried some low-spec cards like the Zotac…
Devices based on the i.MX8 or i.MX8M (such as the Librem phone or MNT Reform) have received popular coverage recently. The number of firmware blobs involved in the bringup of these devices is often a point of discussion. At times, people have considered whether some of these blobs could be replaced with libre…
David Patterson and team at UC Berkeley give RISC its name and make the first RISC microprocessor design.
So for the past year and a half or so I've been using the fantastic Windows btrfs driver for easily sharing files between my Windows and Linux dualboot. The driver works great and basically fully supports everything that both operating systems could ever want (and let me tell you transparent compression and copy on…
The Pico Cray is a cluster of 8 Picos and a controller Pico. All Picos are connected in parallel by an I2C bus. The controller is designated by one GPIO being held low, the processor Pico’s addresses are allocated automatically. The Controller Pico has a 320x240px display connected by SPI and a couple of buttons. ……
How to stabilize digital supply voltages - and why most of the online advice on this topic is suspect.
This is a DS 3600 analog telephone made by Tesla Stropkov in about 1982. It's still functional and to my mind it's absolutely beautiful. Bu...
I’ve heard a lot about classic Doom’s data format and decided to write some Rust code to extract its maps and convert that to vector graphics I could laser cut.
Silver Repair, Restoration, Silver Conservation,…2023147 points79 commentsHardware & Electronics details
Sterling welding with the Lampert PUK04 pulse arc welder.
