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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for
I bought Avnet's $49 Spartan 3A development board but it was discontinued not long afterward - right about the time when I decided I needed a few dozen more. I've since done some extensive research (thanks, Google!) to find a comparable thrifty thrill.
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Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
In June of 2010 I moved to a place in Montana with only electric heat. By myself. In the past few winters I had conducted experiments in cutting the amount of energy I needed to stay warm, with a focus on heating myself instead of heating the whole house.
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Evolutionary algorithms and analog electronic circuits
I've been working for a while on a program that automatically generates analog electronic circuits using evolutionary algorithms. It's still very much a work in progress, but I've used it to generate some useful circuits. Current workings of the program is as follows: Programmer decides a goal function, possible…
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Making an embedded Linux computer
Designing and soldering a small ARM Linux board with 217 ball BGA package and 0402 passive components
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Homemade Speakers
I had the awesome opportunity of taking the EE423 Speaker Design class offered at USC while I was going to school there. The class is taught by engineers from JBL, with some help from people like Tom Holman (the TH in THX guy!), who happens to be a researcher at USC. I learned a lot about speaker design, and ended up…
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HFS+ Bit Rot
HFS+ is a terribly old filesystem with serious flaws. I sincerely hope that Apple comes with an update of the filesystem for WWDC 2015. After all they have been working on Swift for the past 4 years and we have just learned about it last week. HFS+ is seriously old HFS+ was released in 1998, in the era of Mac OS…
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Can I drop a pacemaker 0day?
Can I drop a pacemaker 0day at DefCon that is capable of killing people? Computers now run our cars. It's now possible for a hacker to i...
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We Need Hardware Traps for Integer Overflow
How many problem domains require wrapping signed integers or non-wrapping unsigned integers? Can the current undefined case be replaced with a trap and everything else be left intact?
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Build your own drink mixing robot
I built a robot that mixes drinks named Bar Mixvah. It utilizes an Arduino microcontroller switching a series of pumps via transistors on the physical layer, and the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.js, Node.js) and jQuery for the frontend and backend. In this post, I’ll teach you how I made it. You can follow…
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Discovery's Teardrop
They are perhaps the most easily recognizable tiles in space shuttle history. For shuttle watchers, when you see them, you know exactly which shuttle you are looking at. Only space shuttles Columbia and Enterprise are more recognizable. The four other shuttles — Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — aside…
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I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome
So this past week has been quite a whirlwind — we wrapped up the Novena campaign and smashed all our stretch goals, concluding with over $700k raised , and I got my hair cut in a bar at midnight by none other than the skilled hands of Lenore of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories ( I blame Jake ! :). It was an…
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Explanation of 44.1 kHz CD sampling rate
The CD sampling rate has to be larger than about 40 kHz to fulfill the Nyquist criterion that requires sampling at twice the maximum analog frequency, which is about 20 kHz for audio. The sampling frequency is chosen somewhat higher than the Nyquist rate since practical filters neede to prevent aliasing have a finite…
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Some small suggestions for the Intel instruction set
Programmers trying to make crypto run fast often say things like "Why can't the CPU designer just add a 128-bit multiplication instruction?" Sometimes these questions turn into academic papers analyzing the cycle counts that would be obtained from various instruction-set extensions. What's missing from most of these…
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Dual-touch smartphone design concept
Smartphones have a thumb problem. The touchscreen is a magical invention, but it definitely has its shortcomings.
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iPad charger teardown: inside Apple's charger and a risky phony
This article is now available in Turkish iPad şarjının iç yapısı and Chinese [中文翻译版本] Apple iPad原装充电器拆解 . Apple sells their iPad charger...
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Hacking the Samsung NX300 "Smart" Camera
blog about networking, cameras, old gear, and xmpp
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Magic mirror: One way mirror with a monitor behind it
I build stuff. Virtual and physical. For both business and pleasure. Join me in my development, design and electronics journey.
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My Quest to Build the Ultimate Music Player
Over the past few years, I have been slowly but surely building my own music player. It's been a wild ride. The codebase has radically changed several times, but is always converging on a better music listening experience.
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