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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,806 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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Reverse-engineering and analysis of SanDisk High Endurance microSDXC card (2020)
As seen on Hackaday! TL;DR – The SanDisk High Endurance cards use SanDisk/Toshiba 3D TLC Flash. It took way, way more work than it should have to figure this out (thanks for nothing, SanDisk!…
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YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)
You Tube is clearly used by a very large number of people. In general, they will be interested in watching videos of various types of content. One specific purpose is that it gets used to distribute, and make people aware of, audio recordings. A conversation on the “Pink Fish” webforum devoted to music and audio set…
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Taking a $15 Casio F91W 5km underwater
Brands like Rolex and Omega will often tout their deepsea capabilities with the Rolex Deepsea Challenge rated to 11,000 meters (36,090 feet) and the Omega Ultra Deep coming in at a lesser but still ridiculous 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) of theoretical water resistance. But what about a cheap Casio often associated with…
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PCBs, copper pours, ground planes, and you
A closer look at a fashion trend in printed circuit board design.
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A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
This is a story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000, the first model of the Amiga series. Many of you might be familiar with the popular Amiga 500 or later models, but the Commodore Amiga 1000 was actually the first model of the Amiga series produced. I consider the A1000 a significant piece of home…
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Enhancing your MIDI devices with Perl
This post also appeared on perl.com.
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Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch
The software from this project has been ported to the new Pebble watch here . Source code for the Pebble watchface is available here .
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The future of Rebble
Today we’re excited to announce several developments which will affect the future of Rebble. Let’s get straight into it, starting with the big one…🎉 Google O...
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The Taylorator – All Your Frequencies Are Belong to Us
For the past two weeks or so, I've been working on constructing the Taylorator. The Taylorator is a piece of software which allows me to flood the FM broadcast band with Taylor Swift's music. No matter where you tune your radio, you will only be able to listen to her!
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Reviving a Dead Audio Format: The Return of ZZM
Long-time readers will know that my first video game love was the text-mode video game slash creation studio ZZT. One feature of this game is the ability to ...
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Proper decoupling capacitor practices, and why you should leave 100nF behind
Ever wondered why 100nF is a go-to value for decoupling capacitors? This number has pervaded in datasheets and electronics advice going back to the 1980s, and is still widely present in the datashe…
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Steam Brick: No screen, no controller, just a power button and a USB port
Brick your Steam Deck - one way or another…
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An invalid 68030 instruction accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to boot
This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction.
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Using eSIMs with devices that only have a physical SIM slot via a 9eSIM SIM car
Do you have a phone, tablet, or laptop (or, well, any device…) which will only take a physical SIM, but with which you’d like to use eSIMs?
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UK's hardware talent is being wasted
Imperial, Oxford, and Cambridge produce world-class engineers. Yet post-graduation, their trajectory is an economic tragedy - and a hidden arbitrage opportunity.
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Hacking the Yamaha DX9 to Turn It into a DX7 (2023)
A brief account of hacking the Yamaha DX9's firmware ROM to make its functionality more closely match the DX7.
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The "35-cent" Commodore 64 softmodem
Rockwell famously used 6502-based cores in modems for many years, but that doesn't mean other 6502s couldn't be used. If only there were a w...
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Investigating an “evil” RJ45 dongle
Reverse-engineering hardware can be difficult -- but sometimes, all you need is a comfy armchair and some Google Translate.
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Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs
Today I'm announcing Project MINI RACK, an open source project to help those building homelabs, RF/wireless rigs, and other electronics projects into mini 10" racks. Not everyone can afford (either due to budget or space constraints) to have a full 19" rack in their home. Besides that, people may want to deploy small…
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JTAG 'Hacking' the Original Xbox in 2023
Released in November 2001, the original Xbox was Microsoft’s first venture into the game console industry. With its hardware closely resembling a cheap but v...
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100x defect tolerance: How we solved the yield problem
Cerebras powers the world's fastest AI inference on the biggest wafer chip. Cerebras CS-4 delivers up to 30x faster inference than GPUs.
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Cosmos Keyboard: Scan your hand, build a keyboard
Cosmos is the easiest way to design a keyboard around your one-of-a-kind hands. Scan your hand using just your phone camera, then fit a keyboard to the scan. The key positions align to your fingers' lengths and movement.
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From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon
Implementing the famous donut.c animation in actual silicon using CORDIC and ray marching
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I will never need to buy a new computer again
If you're in your early thirties or older, you remember the breakneck pace at which computers were improving in the 90s and 2000s. If you brought home a shiny new 400MHz Pentium 2 system in 1998, it was literally outdated and replaced by a faster model with higher clock speed and more RAM/bigger harddrive by the time…
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De-smarting the Marshall Uxbridge
This is the story of a commercially unavailable stereo pair of thebi-amped Marshall Uxbridge, with custom-built replacement electronics:active filters feedin...
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Why is my CPU usage always 100%?
If you’re new to this series, I’ve been documenting the process I went through upgrading my old PXA166-based Chumby 8’s 2.6.28 Linux kernel to a modern 6.x version. Here are links to parts 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , and 8 . At this point in the project, all of the main hardware peripherals were working great. I…