181
The Serial TTL connector we deserve
Goodbye dangling Dupont pins, hello Julet E-Bike connector. I have them now everywhere, from my router to my servers.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
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182
What makes a good smartphone camera?
There are lots of things that affect the quality of photographs. The biggest one is the skill of the photographer behind the camera.
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Comparing the Z80 and 6502 to Their Relatives
Last week’s adventures with the Exidy Sorcerer led me to write a Z80 version of the LZ4 decompressor I’d previously used on the SNES, the CoCo, and the Genesis. At this point, this has …
185
Discovering hard disk physical geometry through microbenchmarking (2019)
Modern hard drives store an incredible amount of data in a small space, and are still the default choice for high-capacity (though not highest-performance) storage. While hard drives have been around since the 1950s, the current 3.5″ form factor (actually 4″ wide) appeared in the early 1980s. Since then, the capacity…
186
The USB Situation
I write this from the latest MacBook Pro. I've been running this as my primary machine for almost a month. When I'm not grinding out the latest soon-to-be-relea
187
I built my own hair electrolysis machine
Axiom: body hair is cringe. That's how I feel, at least. I decided to build a machine that lets me permanently remove it using electricity.
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How I leared what a decoupling capacitor is for, the hard way
I was very excited to get the latest version of my PCB from the manufacturer.
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USB Cheat Sheet (2022)
I spend time investigating a non-existing bug today because I misunderstood a USB term. So I made myself a cheat sheet. Maybe it will save time to someone.
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The quiet resurgence of RF engineering
I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it wa...
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Mo RAM, Mo Problems (2025)
As a retro-computer enthusiast, it seems that parts are either insanely expensive or dirt cheap. If the first case has obvious problems, the second can also lead to issues.
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New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper
For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was to buy an expensive, large, and hot 10 GbE Thunderbolt adapter. With new RTL8159-based 10G USB 3.2 adapters coming onto the market, the bulky adapters might be a thing of the past. Just look at the size of the thing in comparison to my Thunderbolt…
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My audio interface has SSH enabled by default
I bought a Rodecaster Duo to solve some audio woes, and found that it has ssh enabled by default. I captured the firmware update process and created custom firmware to enable password authentication for ssh.
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My phone replaced a brass plug
Porting a 2012 OpenCV paper to YOLOv8 and CoreML on iOS to score rifle shooting targets from a photo - replacing the brass-plug scoring gauge with on-device computer vision.
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MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be
iPads should be radically touch only, and MacBooks should be keyboard-first
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How does GPS work?
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
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The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker
Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets...
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Mechanical Keyboard Sounds – A listening Museum
36 mechanical keyboards. Click. Type. Listen. From IBM Model M (1985) to modern thocky customs.
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80386 Memory Pipeline
The FPGA 386 core I've been building now boots DOS, runs applications like Norton Commander, and plays games like Doom. On DE10-Nano it currently runs at 75 MHz. With the core now far enough along to run real software, this seems like a good point to step back and look at one of the 80386's performance-critical…
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The Physics of GPS
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
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Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
If you often get static electricity shocks when touching your laptop or your office chair, or your monitor goes black when you stand up, this may interest you.
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The Orange Pi 6 Plus
This was a long one–I spent a fair bit of time with the Orange Pi 6 Plus over the past few months, and what I expected to be a quick look at another fast ...
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Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
The killer app for the 486 didn't come out until a year or so later
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Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR
How to move fast when building for the physical world
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Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
I spent years building one of the most popular LED strip visualizers on GitHub. It's the kind of project that's easy to get started but diabolically hard to master.
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Tofolli gates are all you need
Any Boolean function can be computed with Tofolli gates, and Tofolli gates are reversible, and so any Boolean function can be computed reversibly.
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Every GPU That Mattered
49 graphics cards. 30 years. From Quake to Cyberpunk.
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Will I ever own a zettaflop?
As the eleventh hour dawns all the pieces start to fall into place. I lived my life knowing this would happen, yet when it is I may be just as unprepared as anyone else. As any self driving car maker knows, predicting doesn’t mean you can act.
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Build your own Dial-up ISP with a Raspberry Pi
Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs1. It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11…
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DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
Today Raspberry Pi announced more price increases for all Pis with LPDDR4 RAM, alongside a 'right-sized' 3GB RAM Pi 4 for $83.75. The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99. Despite today's date, this is not a joke. I published a video going over the state of the hobbyist 'high end SBC' market (4/8/16 GB…