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VHDL or Verilog?
Blog about VHDL projects for FPGA. FPGA tutorials. FPGA free books.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,808 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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Engineers Investigate a Simple, No-Bake Recipe to Make Bricks from Martian Soil
Explorers planning to settle on Mars might be able to turn the planet’s red soil into bricks without needing to use an oven or additional ingredients. Instead, they would just need to apply pressure to compact the soil—the equivalent of a blow from a hammer. These are the findings of a study published in Nature…
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Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound effect chip from die photos
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
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Show HN: Sorting Two Metric Tons of Lego
One of my uncles cursed me with the LEGO bug, when I was 6 he gave me his collection because he was going to university. My uncle and I are relatively close in age, my dad was the eldest of 8 children and he is the youngest. So, for many years I did nothing but play with lego, build all kinds of machinery and in…
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Rust your ARM microcontroller
A blog about Rust and embedded stuff
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Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
Jeff Atwood, perhaps the most widely read programming blogger, has a post that makes a case against using ECC memory . My read is that his major points are:
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My Hackintosh Hardware Spec
Some of you have asked about my exact Hackintosh spec, so here it is. I built my Hackintosh in March/April 2014, after finally deciding that the Mac Pro was too expensive and didn’t really fit my needs. The spec I was going to go for was an 8-core model, with 32 gigs of RAM, a 1 TB flash
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Experimental Nighttime Photography with Nexus and Pixel
Posted by Florian Kainz, Software Engineer, Google DaydreamOn a full moon night last year I carried a professional DSLR camera, a heavy lens and a ...
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Why Juicero’s Press Is So Expensive
Hidden away in Juicero’s bad week of press is one of the most powerful lessons we preach to hardware startups: unconstrained development is lethal. Last week Bloomberg published an article exposing how easy it is to “hack” Juicero’s produce packs by squeezing them with your hands, deeming the $69
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ARM Releases Machine Readable Architecture Specification
Researcher at Intel
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Automated snare drum made to the order of Aphex Twin (2014)
This musical robot consists of a high quality Ludwig snare drum automated with 13 beaters hitting different spots of the membrane from the inside. Two solenoid driven drum sticks, mounted externally, take care of the rimshots. Of course, all beaters have a precise and wide range velocity control. The snares can be…
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I reverse engineered a motherboard
Wherein I looked into controlling the RGB header on my motherboard without any access to public documentation.
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2017 Camera News
Herewith some reportage on the most interesting cameras in the world, with opinions to provoke er entertain people who are up on this stuff, and a basic survey of the landscape for people who like pictures and wonder about cameras.
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The new Mac Pro: The audacity to say “Yes” in a design culture of “No”
Much of modern Apple’s design philosophy is to relentlessly strip down most products to the bare minimum in certain areas as technological progress allows, following (and largely defining) the modern design fashion of nearly-unquestioned devotion to minimalism.
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Memory bandwidth
Absolute memory bandwidth figures tend to look fairly large, especially for GPUs. This is deceptive. It’s much more useful to relate memory bandwidth to say the number of clock cycles or inst…
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Building a NAS
I’ve been fascinated by high-volume, fault-tolerant data storage systems for a long time. I started my data storage setup in earnest with a 4-disk RAID 5 array on an ARC-1210 controller installed in my daily-driver Windows desktop. When that array inevitably filled up, I added another array on a second ARC-1210. That…
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COAP endpoints on IKEA Trådfri
Hi, great work, I was just about to get down to trying to work this out. I’d got as far noticing it was CoAP and DTLS but no further yet ( https://gist.github.com/hardillb/4ce9fc493b792806e39f7fae4b7c28a7 ). CoAP is new to me so finding out it’s somewhat self describing is really useful.
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Color Night Vision (2016) [video]
The X27 camera takes videos in darkness that looks like they were shot in the daytime. And they’re in color…none of this black and white, thermal, or infrared s
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In love with the BBC micro:bit
I finally got my hands on the micro:bit , the BBC ’s new educational computer and spiritual successor to the legendary BBC Micro , and I’m absolutely in love with its potential as a platform for learning how to code.
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Lego Macintosh Classic with e‑paper display
*tl;dr: I built a Wi-Fi enabled LEGO Macintosh Classic running Docker on a Raspberry Pi Zero with an e‑paper display. Docker deployments via resin.io. photos
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Quantifying the performance of the TPU, our first machine learning chip
We’re releasing a study that shares new details on our Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) custom chips which have been running machine learning applications in our data centers since 2015.
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The Mac Pro Lives
Apple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking hot-running GPUs, and which should make it easier for Apple to update with new components on a regular basis. They’re also working on Apple-branded pro displays to go with them…
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Rotating molecules enable near 100% efficient OLEDs
Scientists have discovered a group of materials which could pave the way for a new generation of high-efficiency lighting, solving a quandary which has inhibited the performance of display technology for decades. The development of energy saving concepts in display and lighting applications is a major focus of…
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