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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
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An Introduction to CubeSats
An introduction that answers the questions what are cubesats, why they are so popular, what are their main subststems, and how does thier future look?
How to Hack an Expensive Camera
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New Dell XPS 13 developer edition now available
Last January the Dell XPS 13 developer edition (9370) made its debut. Today we’re excited to announce that one year later its successor, the XPS 13 developer edition (9380), is now available…
Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
The Pixelbook and four other fairly new Chromebooks have the special flag to enable GPU acceleration, making these the first to get the new feature for Linux. This should bring the Android emulator and improved gaming capabilities to Project Crostini.
Lisp Badge – Self-contained ATmega1284 Lisp computer
This is a self-contained computer with its own display and keyboard, based on an ATmega1284, that you can program in the high-level language Lisp:
Modchips of the State
Collection of my projects and hacks.
Understanding the BeagleBone’s built in microcontrollers (2016)
The BeagleBone Black is an inexpensive, credit-card sized computer that has two built-in microcontrollers called PRUs. While the PRUs provi...
Lessons from Running a Small-Scale Electronics Factory in My Guest Bedroom
After assembling over 200 Telephreak badges by hand for DEFCON 26 (and taking *way* longer to accomplish it than I estimated) I figured I should document some of the lessons that I learned along the way – from initial design to finished product. The subject of many of the examples of the right way to […]
Build your own IoT/MQTT node for less than $2
How to use a bare ESP-12F module as a standalone IoT/MQTT node — powered directly from a USB charger with just a handful of passive componen...
Chinese Crankshafts (2012)
To read an updated on this story please click on this link: Chinese Crankshafts for Corvairs, update 2/17/13. If the pictures on this story are small, try clicking on the F5 key at the top of you…
AirPods get stuck in low-quality 16 kHz audio mode when starting a VM
I always love when I find a really dumb solution that works reliably to fix a problem that should never really be a problem in the first place. But having worked with audio devices before—though nothing nearly as complex as the AirPods—I am willing to cut Apple some slack in building a seamless aural experience with…
The Internet of Unprofitable Things
Gather 'round children. Uncle Andrew wants to tell you a festive story. The NTPmare shortly after Christmas
Build your own bare-metal ARM cluster
Learn everything you need to know about building your very own bare-metal ARM cluster with Docker and Kubernetes including real life use-cases.
A Full Hardware Guide to Deep Learning
In this guide I analyse hardware from CPU to SSD and their impact on performance for deep learning so that you can choose the hardware that you really need.
Oculus GoBlack – How to Make Your Oculus Go Better
Oculus Go, like all products, is the result of a series of compromises around cost, schedule, quality, and competence. It is clearly the best standalone VR platform on the market, but anyone …
Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
So I had this idea that it would be nice to listen to music when I get home from work everyday, so I put all my ripped music onto my phone, and I bought some good quality over-ear headphones.
Teensy 3.1 bare metal: Writing a USB driver (2014)
Electronics, Embedded Systems, and Software are my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Designing and building an FPGA sprite-based graphics accelerator (2014)
A very warm welcome to my most ambitious project to date. In this project I’m going to attempt to design and build a sprite-based graphics accelerator that will function as a co-processor to an MCU. Using cheap off-the-shelf components I’m hoping to achieve a level of gaming performance that compares well to popular…
Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine (2001)
Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine architecture
Fast line-following robots
Since February 2016, I have been participating in DIYRobocars meetups here in the SF Bay Area, wherein a bunch of amateur roboticists compete in autonomous time trials with RC cars. I had been doing very well in the competition with essentially just a glorified line-following robot, but have lately upgraded to a full…
Memory-Level Parallelism: Intel Skylake versus Apple A12/A12X
Modern processors execute instructions in parallel in many different ways: multi-core parallelism is just one of them. In particular, processor cores can have several outstanding memory access requests "in flight". This is often described as "memory-level parallelism". You can measure the level of memory-level…
How Many Computers Are in Your Computer?
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
96-core ARM supercomputer using the NanoPi-Fire3
Building a high performance supercomputer for under £100 (£550 including twelve Fire3s). Parts list, benchmarks and downloadable plans for laser-cutting the acrylic case.