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A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
Building a fully functional Linux handheld computer for under $15, featuring a custom PCB design, minimal BOM cost, and practical usability
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 421 posts.
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Simulating the IBM 360/50 mainframe from its microcode
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. System/360 was an extremely risky "bet-t...
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We purchased a machine from China and it came with malware preinstalled
Zhengbang ZB3245 review. We bought a Zhengbang Pick & Place machine and this page tells you all about our experience of setting up and using.
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Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol
Summary : Steve Jobs's NeXT computer company made a keyboard in 1988. With no prior electronics experience, I tried to get it to work over USB. To do so, I had to go way deeper than I ever expected - all the way back over 100 years to broadcast radio standards from the 1920s. I learned tons and tons, and had a lot of…
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Silicon die teardown: a look inside an early 555 timer chip
If you've played around with electronic circuits, you probably know the 555 timer integrated circuit, 1 said to be the world's best-selli...
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Device wraps around hot surfaces, turns wasted heat to electricity
Penn State scientists have created flexible thermoelectric devices that can wrap around pipes and other hot surfaces, converting wasted heat into electricity more efficiently than previously possible.
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Linux on a 486SX
Linux on a 486SX A year or two ago, I came into posession of a 1993 Compaq Presario 425. It's a Mac-ish all-in-one with a 14" color (S?)VGA screen capable of 800x600 in full 256-color glory. On the inside it features a 25MHz i486SX (the sort without a floating-point unit), paired with 20MB of RAM - a significant…
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Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world
I’m not a POWER (or recently: Power) expert, only an enthusiastic user and advocate. Still, in the past couple of weeks a number of people from around the world asked my opinion how the POWER architecture could be kept relevant. This blog is really just an opinion, as I do not have the financial means to go ahead. It…
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I built my own Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) hardware dev kit from scratch
How I built a Sega Mega Drive dev kit from scratch: reverse engineering the cartridge slot, a homemade logic analyzer, a RAM cartridge and boot firmware.
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An Armful of CHERIs
Microsoft Security Response Center Blog2022105 points24 commentscited by 3Security & Privacy details
Today, Arm announced that the first silicon supporting the Morello prototype architecture, a research project led by Arm, Microsoft, University of Cambridge and others, is now available on a limited run of demonstration boards, which are being shipped from today to industry partners for testing. Morello is the first…
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The Intel Split
It appears that Intel’s partnership with TSMC is much larger than it first seemed; the implications for Intel as whole are massive.
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uLisp on the Raspberry Pi Pico
The RP2040 is a microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi in the UK. It's a dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ running at 200 MHz which provides up to 16 MB of off-chip flash and 264 KB on-chip RAM. It has 30 GPIO pins, 4 of which can be used as analogue inputs, two UARTs, two SPI controllers, two I2C controllers, and 16…
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Life at 800 MHz
We’ve been using a Sony Vaio VGN-P588E for the past few months as our primary personal laptop. This thing’s great; it’s got a small but not uncomfortable keyboard. It’s got a trackpoint, which we absolutely need to keep our hands healthy. Crucially, it’s only 1.5 pounds. We’re disabled in a way that means we’ve got to…
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Engine cooling – why rocket engines don’t melt
Rocket engines use a multitude of cooling concepts to keep them from melting themselves. Learn more about engine cooling in this article.
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5.5 mm in 1.25 nanoseconds
In 2004 I was working for Microsoft in the Xbox group, and a new console was being created. I got a copy of the detailed descriptions of the Xbox 360 CPU and I read it through multiple times and su…
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Ghost in the ethernet optic
A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of SFP optic that claimed to be smart, made by a Russian company Plumspace . After going through their Smart SFP product listings I was on-board and decided I needed to have some of them.
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Great AA Alkaline Battery Test (2016)
Regular readers would probably know that I have a love of batteries, and their associated test equipment. Maybe it was the fact that they were expensive, but pervasive, and my enjoyment as a child …
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The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)
Sometime in 2024, the IEEE will unveil a new 802.11 standard that will bring new capabilities to everyone’s favorite wireless communication standard. But the upcoming 802.11bf standard isn’t for communication — it’s for sensing. The newest version of Wi-Fi layers on the ability to sense people or objects by using math…
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I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
How trying out new laptops and messing with my personal computing setup motivated me to go back to a laptop that some would call ancient.
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Making nice-looking and interactive diagrams for your PCBs
I have always liked pinout diagrams like this: Arduino Nano Pinout. Source: http://www.pighixxx.com/test/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/nano.pngThey work quite well, there is all the information and they look nice. However, they work only when you have pins on two sides of the PCB and once you squeeze too much information…
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Framework Laptop with Ubuntu Review
I built my own laptop over the holiday break and it’s a developer’s dream come true. I took a chance and ordered a Framework Laptop DIY Edition. I’m so glad I did. The Framework is an excellent platform to customize and build a very capable and stable Linux machine for development. Here’s what I love about it and…
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DIY Onewheel – open-source self balancing skateboard
digital build guide
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Power, frequency, management: how M1 E cores win
macOS manages the loading and frequency of M1 cores according to the QoS set, and rules which differ between the original M1 and the M1 Pro.
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Computers Built to Last
I've recently thought a lot about the essay The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum. It's a delightful piece about the author's ideal, long-lasting computational platform - precisely the thing I enjoy reading. It's got a nice blend of slow tech and libre computing advocacy mixed with personal ponderings centered…