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Interesting double-poly latches inside AMD's vintage LANCE Ethernet chip
I've studied a lot of chips from the 1970s and 1980s, so I usually know what to expect. But an Ethernet chip from 1982 had something new: a ...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 294 posts.
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7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel 12th/13th gen
Maybe a poem will help remember complicated power-saving settings for SSDs. Here goes. "ALPM for SATA, not N-V-M-e. The latter needs ASPM, and A-P-S-T"....
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Ottopot, a sophisticated DIY MIDI controller
This is the ottopot. It's a MIDI controller I made with nothing but 8 dials. However, the dials I made in the highest quality that I possibly could. There are 2 things in particular that I haven't seen in any other similar devices: High resolution with 14bit MIDI CCs (12bit effective resolution) and a quasi-1:1…
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More fun with Apple's internal tools: creating a PDS card
In my last post , I figured out how to use Apple’s leaked Flasher utility from the 1990s to reflash a ROM SIMM inside of my Performa 630. It’s basically the Mac equivalent of a BIOS update, but only for Apple’s developers. The research involved in that post was quite a journey of reverse engineering from both a…
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48x32: A 1536 LED Game Computer
My children are hopelessly addicted to their gaming devices. This is a problem, but not one that I can directly solve because the school mandates that they have both an Android smartphone and a Windows laptop. Rather than to meet the problem head on I figured the better way to address it is to replace consumption with…
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Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
I think it is healthy to compare historical and modern computing. Let's see how the CPUs contained in recent USB-C wall chargers compare to the power of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC). The Apollo 11 spacecraft carried 3 humans to the moon and back in 1969.
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Emulating an iPod Touch 2G using QEMU
My personal website.
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Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets
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Resetting the timer in my toothbrush
It’s still good to use, I swear
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Looking into the Stadia Controller Bluetooth Mode Website
With the end of Google's Stadia platform on January 18, 2023, Google published a website allowing people to "Switch the Stadia Controller ...
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The transparent chip inside a vintage Hewlett-Packard floppy drive
While repairing an eight-inch HP floppy drive, we found that the problem was a broken interface chip. Since the chip was bad, I decapped it ...
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My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter
It turns out that you can't trust any USB type A power adapter to be within spec.
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Two interesting XOR circuits inside the Intel 386 processor
Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a 32-bit processor but also switching to a...
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The New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen
Some might remember a book I released in 2016, “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen”. A lot has changed in the world since then, and Shenzhen is no exception.
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I bricked my Christmas lights
Reverse engineering Bluetooth LE LED light controllers, or How I Bricked My Christmas Lights If a device communicates via Bluetooth LE and has an app, it deserves to be integrated into my home automation system. I’ve spent a significant amount of time reverse engineering various budget-friendly LED light strips to...
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Whisper: Nvidia RTX 4090 vs. M1 Pro with MLX
How fast is my Whisper Benchmark with the MLX Framework from Apple? Nvidia 4090 / M1 Pro / M2 Ultra / M3
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Motorola's pioneering 8-bit 6800: Origins and architecture
Part 1 of the story of Motorola's 8-bit microprocessor design
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Fake chips, I got stung
Unfortunately, in the tech sector, just like many other sectors, there are scammers around. When you are dealing with electronics this is typically in the form of chips that have had their markings…
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The 8-bit era: Eight processor designs
Why do the 8-bit designs of the 1970s still generate so much interest?
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The analog computer for the Nike missile system (2001)
Nike computer - Installed in class room, not BC van. From Rolf Goerigk Left rack has the power supplies - outputs about 7 different voltages. Top panel is switches, meters, voltage warning lights. (Note: in the van installation, this rack is on the right side of the computer.) Middle two racks - operational amplifies…
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Review: A Dive into Mikrotik's Weird SmartNIC (2022)
an addendum has been posted, read it here 2023/12/02 - Hello, Hacker News! Check out these pictures of my cat: https://emma.pet Back in February, Mikrotik announced the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe, a peculiar 25gbps NIC. They’ve thrown an entire router into a PCIe NIC. But why? Wait, why? Mikrotik’s product listing has…
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The Intel 386 processor die: the clock circuit
Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip. In this blog post, I'll examine the clock-generati...
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My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
An adorable side project featuring SwiftUI, MapKit, and open-source APIs