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Your CPU may have slowed down on Wednesday
The death of hardware store optimization.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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Spatial Audio
I got the following e-mail from a producer/engineer: “I just want to try and alert you to the potential seismic scam happening with this Atmos roll out. Â Atmos catalog remixing is being done…
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The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
There's something happening in the E Ink space, somewhat quietly, but ...
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Found at Goodwill: WebPad 1001 Prototype
I found this strange looking device at Goodwill yesterday. Originally, owing perhaps to the bright blue color, I thought it was some sort of educational or kids device. It had no branding on it, so…
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Conway's Game of Life on FPGA
When learning a new programming language, I like having a well defined yet non-trivial problem to solve. Conway’s Game of Life (GoL) fits this definition. It has enough depth to uncover various tradeoffs. So naturally, when I picked up Chisel hardware description language (HDL), I wanted to build Game of Life in FPGA…
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Using a magnetic string to fish for a lost iPhone 12 in a Berlin canal
It‘s been a couple of days since a friend of mine dropped his iPhone 12 Pro into the canal in Kreuzberg, Berlin. News made it all around the world by now, being featured on all Apple News pages that exist: AppleInsider , 9to5Mac , The Loop , iPhone Ticker , iMore , Hi Tekno , Mac4Ever , Appgefahren , Macerkopf …
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The Apple M1 compiles Linux 30% faster than my Intel i9
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.) It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building…
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Scamp – a homebrew 16-bit CPU
I have reached a good milestone on the SCAMP hardware: it can now execute code! It runs all the way through the test program correctly.
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Why did bar ends go away from mountain bikes?
For a little over a decade, they enjoyed strong popularity among mountain bikers, but then the feelings got cold.
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Teardown of a PC Power Supply
Have you ever wondered what's inside your computer's power supply? The task of a PC power supply is to convert the power from the wall (1...
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Rapid Prototyping with a $100 Inkjet Printer
Why just print forms and airline tickets from an inkjet printer when you can print electronics! All you need to do is to replace the…
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Solved by 1440p HiDPI: MacBook Pro 16“ is hot and noisy with an external monitor
TLDR: My Macbook Pro 16" is hot and noisy when connected to a 2560x1440p60 monitor, even when idle and the lid is closed. This article…
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Squeezebox Keyboard
Staff Engineer, Back End
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The tools and tech I use to run a one-woman hardware company
A look into the tech and tools used by Winterbloom
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Recovering “lost” treasure-filled floppy discs with an oscilloscope
There are many good, modern solutions for reading data off old floppy discs and drives. Perhaps the best is the Greaseweazle : it's capable,...
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How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS
By segregating macOS background tasks on Efficiency cores, M1 Macs can run user apps unfettered on their Performance cores. And that feels really fast.
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A Pixel Purse LED Cube Controlled by a Cisco 3G Modem
I presented this project at BangBangCon West 2020, but never got around to publish a blog post about it. A 10 minute talk is not enough to cover some technical aspects, and since I’m starting to forget them, it’s about time to write things down.
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Observing my cellphone switch towers
One of my favorite books is 2013 "High Performance Browser Networking" by Ilya Grigorik. Besides a wealth of actionable advice, the book is illustrated with captivating real life stories.
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The chip shortage could lead to an era of hardware innovation
It’s bad out there for customers of electronic parts and components. The semiconductor shortage is so severe it’s being covered by mainstream media; meanwhile, various politicians have tasked their aides with looking at the global supply chain. Indeed, in the short term, the dearth of chips is already leading to…
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Tried Nvidia’s GTX 1080 – still no external GPU on a Pi
Earlier today I did a livestream on my YouTube channel to attempt using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. As with all my testing, I'm documenting everything I learn in this GitHub issue, which is part of the Raspberry Pi PCI Express Card Database website. It's only been a few hours, but…
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How SpaceX lands Starship (sort of)
aka: how I “accidentally” discovered what I already suspected: optimization methods are at the heart of landing rockets.
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Reverse Engineering an Unknown Microcontroller
Dmitry.GR: How to reverse engineer a completely undocumented microcontroller. From nothing to a full SDK in one week flat!
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How I built the world's first 3D ultrasonic scanner
Here's how I built an ultrasonic 3d scanner that works in the air, using off-the-shelf components.
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Chiptunes on an ATtiny4 and the 3 Cent Micro
Ever since hearing about Rob Miles' Bitshift Variations in C Minor , a 4-voice polyphonic 16 minute piece of algorithmically generated music, I wanted to implement it in hardware. Getting it onto just any microcontroller seemed too easy , so I wanted it to run on the smallest µC I could find — the ATtiny4. A while…
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Bootstrapping an Amiga without a bootable floppy
I have just released a serial port based Amiga disk and file transfer tool, amigaXfer .
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part IV
After beginning a compiler for the Apple M1 GPU , the next step is to develop a graphics driver exercising the compiler. Since the last post two weeks ago, I’ve begun a Gallium driver for the M1, implementing much of the OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 specifications. With the compiler and driver together, we’re now able to run…