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Reverse engineering the ARM1, ancestor of the iPhone's processor
Almost every smartphone uses a processor based on the ARM1 chip created in 1985. The Visual ARM1 simulator shows what happens inside the...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 95 posts.
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MirrorMirror: A Raspberry Pi-Powered Magic Mirror
A magic mirror is a raspberry pi powered monitor behind a double sided mirror. A mostly black web page allows you to add some widgets to the mirror’s reflection as if by magic. This version includes widgets for displaying the weather forecast, the date/time and a nice randomly generated greeting. No low level hardware…
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Moore's law hits the roof
Software optimization resources | E-mail subscription to this blog | www.agner.org
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Wifibroadcast – Analog-like transmission of live video data
Wifibroadcast is a project aimed at the live transmission of HD video (and other) data using wifi radios. One prominent use case is to transmit camera images for a first person view (FPV) of remote…
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Raspberry Pi Zero vs. Elliott 405
Twitter users @SadHappyAmazing and @HistoricalPics posted yesterday two photographs (copy) showing the Raspberry Pi Zero juxtaposed in front of the Norwich City Council Treasurer's Department building, where the delivery of the Elliott 405 computer was photographed in 1957. Here is how the two computers compare.
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Building the Tamagotchi Singularity
I also gave a talk about this project on the Hackaday Superconference 2015. There is a video available of that if you'd rather watch me talk. You can also directly view the end result if you so please.
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Why FPGA manufacturers keep their bitstream formats secret
Every FPGA vendor keeps the bitstream format for their device secret. Only the tools provided in binary-only format by the vendor (and a select few third parties under NDA) can generate these bitstreams.
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Raspberry Pi Zero Hidden in an Xbox Controller
I like to tinker. My wife picked me up the new Raspberry Pi Zero. It's an ultra small and ridiculously cheap computer. How small and cheap? They give it away free on the cover of magazines... Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf you hurry down to WHSmith in Oxford, there are still a few @TheMagP1 copies left.❤️ 3💬 0🔁…
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Listening to satellites for $30
I've ever dreamed of space & satellites, it turms out you can received pictures from them.
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Macbook charger teardown: surprising complexity inside Apple's power adapter
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
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To ECC or Not to ECC
On one of my visits to the Computer History Museum – and by the way this is an absolute must-visit place if you are ever in the San Francisco bay area – I saw an early Google server rack circa 1999 in the exhibits. Not too fancy, right? Maybe even… a
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SVG Mask Artwork of the Intel 4004
The Intel 4004 after 44 years: scalable vector mask artwork, Rubylith cutters, replica PCB rev 2, printer emulator code.
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How transistors really work (1995)
Most technician textbooks do a very poor job of explaining the details of transistors' internal workings. First they assume that the Base current is somehow controlling the Collector current, then they try to explain how one current can affect another. These explanations invariably fail because Bipolar transistors…
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How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things
New radios that combine miles of range with years of battery life are changing the way we build and use connected devices. Here’s how.
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The Plum-O-Meter: Weighing Plums Using 3D Touch in Swift
Here at FlexMonkey Towers, the ever beautiful Mrs FlexMonkey and I love to spend our Sunday mornings luxuriating in bed drinking Mimosa...
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MicroPython on the BBC micro:bit
A summary of the work done so far on getting MicroPython to work on the BBC micro:bit device for children.
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Homemade synthetic aperture radar
Second version of the 6 GHz FMCW radar now with SAR images
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Lorentz forces and cheating at the Pinewood Derby
The annual Pinewood Derby in my Cub Scout troop was always an exciting time for my friends and me growing up. Just look how happy I am in this amazing digital photo composition that my dad put together using Microsoft PictureIt! 99:
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ARM server market
Microservers and the motivations for microservers have been around for years. I first blogged about them back in 2008 ( Cooperative, Expendable, Microslice, Servers: Low-Cost, Low-Power Servers for Internet-Scale Services ) and even Intel has entered the market with Atom but it’s the ARM instruction set architecture…
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Why Intel Added Cache Partitioning
Typical server utilization is between 10% and 50%. Google has demonstrated 90% utilization without impacting latency SLAs . Xkcd estimated that Google owns 2 million machines . If you estimate an amortized total cost of $4k per machine per year , that's $8 billion per year. With numbers like that, even small…
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IBM is still making ThinkPad keyboards
This week I was doing a bit of shopping for an external keyboard for my old Thinkpad x200 laptop. I've grown used to its comfy keyboard and its trackpoint, so I looked on ebay to see if I could find one of the older external USB equivalents.
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