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27-inch iMac gets a major update
Apple today announced a major update to its 27-inch iMac that makes it the most powerful and capable iMac ever, along with improvements to the display, camera, speakers, and mics.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 383 posts.
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Hacking Portable Air Conditioners
I bought a couple EdgeStar AP14001HS portable air conditioners in April 2020, since I expect to spend most of the Summer at home. I'm not able to use window A/Cs here, though that would be the obvious choice for efficiency because all the hot parts remain outside.
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Unbricking a $2k bike with a $10 Raspberry Pi
A few years ago I splurged on an exercise bike. It’s a pretty expensive item imho, both in upfront and ongoing subscription costs. But I was able to justify it by riding it all the time so that per-ride it wasn’t that expensive. I’m happy to say this was a huge boon for my fitness and it was worth every penny.
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Reverse Engineering the PLA Chip in the Commodore 128
As I mentioned in my last post I’ve been working on reverse engineering the PLA chip in the C128. I’m now mostly done with this process so I think it’s time to share some of the findings.
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Tihle: A new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators
Today I’m publishing tihle, a new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators (currently only the 83+, but maybe others later). There’s rather a lot to say about it, but here I will discuss the motivation for a new emulator and the state of the art followed by technical notes on the design and initial development…
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Librem 5 Phone Dogwood Thermals and Battery Life
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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Data Runner Watch Prototype – Modded Casio F91W
Today I want to show you a watch modification that I've been working on. I'm calling it the Data Runner, and it's another F91W mod, this time going the extra mile to make something functional and nice looking.
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Pinebook Pro longer term usage report
I bought a Pinebook Pro in the first batch, and have been using it on and off for several months now. Some people I know wanted to know if ...
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Inside the 8086 processor, tiny charge pumps create a negative voltage
Introduced in 1978, the revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor led to the x86 processors used in most desktop and server computing today....
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On Liberating My Smartwatch from Cloud Services
I’ve often said that if we convince ourselves that technology is magic, we risk becoming hostages to it . Just recently, I had a brush with this fate, but happily, I was saved by open source.
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Z80 Explorer – a Zilog Z80 netlist-level simulator
Z80 Explorer is a Z80 netlist-level simulator capable of running Z80 machine code and also an educational tool with features that help reverse engineer and understand this chip better.
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Pine64 announce the Pinecil, TS100 compatible RISC-V soldering iron
I cannot remember the last time I had this much to report. With so many announcements and highlights, I ran out of time and didn’t cover a handful of topics that happened this month. If I find the time, I’ll make a complimentary post later this month to cover the outstanding topics. Before we get into it, I’d also…
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Building DIY LED strips for fun
I work remotely and have for many years, but let's be honest: it's the case for a lot of people now. Lately I've been trying to step up how my home office looks, especially with regards to its video conferencing capabilities. I started using a DSLR as
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The Intel 8086 processor's registers: from chip to transistors
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop and...
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How Pulse Oximeters Work (2015)
Principles of how pulse oximetry works explained without using complicated physics.
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Reverse engineering a camera protocol for fun and profit
Way back in late 2019 , I dissected a Reolink B800 IP camera to demonstrate the various parts of an embedded Linux system. It’s fairly nice hardware, actually—it has a 4K video sensor, a microphone, power over Ethernet, and is nominally waterproof. And yes, it runs Linux.
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Pixelopolis, a self-driving car demo from Google I/O built with TensorFlow-Lite
Pixelopolis is an interactive installation that showcases self-driving miniature cars powered by TensorFlow Lite. Each car is outfitted with its own Pixel phone, which used its camera to detect and understand signals from the world around it. In order to sense lanes, avoid collisions and read traffic signs, the phone…
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The AirPods Pro “Rattlegate”
The AirPods Pro “Rattlegate” The first generation of the AirPods was generally regarded as a perfect product. “Apple at its best!” was the universally accepted opinion. I used them for a long time. No speaker issues, no battery issues. Excited for the noise cancelling feature I ordered the AirPods Pro and for the…
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Tin Can Phone Modem
Mike Kohn's music, software, and electronics projects.
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New Compute Engine A2 VMs–First Nvidia Ampere A100 GPUs in the Cloud
Google Cloud’s new Accelerator-Optimized (A2) VM family is based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPU, and designed for demanding HPC and ML workloads.
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Robot Disinfects Greater Boston Food Bank
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), in collaboration with Ava Robotics and the Greater Boston Food Bank, designed a robot that disinfects surfaces and neutralizes aerosolized coronavirus with UV-C light. The approach uses a custom UV-C light fixture designed at CSAIL that is…
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Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
Did you ever dream about creating your own chip? I mean, a physical chip. One which you can hold in your hand, and which does exactly what you've designed it to do?
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Exciting Days for ARM Processors
Introduction ARM CPUs have long dominated the mobile world, nearly all Apple and Android phones and tablets utilize some model of ARM processor. However Intel and AMD still dominate the laptop, des…
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I made a macro keypad with 3D-printed switches
Latest on the 3d-printed keyboard switch project: I've reached a switch design that I think is probably reliable enough, and I've put 3 of them together to form a macro keypad just to see how it all goes together before I commit to a full keyboard. I don't have a number for how many presses the switch lasts, other…
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UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster
You can view a video related to this blog post here: Does UASP make the Raspberry Pi faster?. A couple weeks ago, I did some testing with my Raspberry Pi 4 and external USB SSD drives. I found a USB 3.0 SSD was ten times faster than the fastest microSD card I tested. In the comments on the video associated with that…
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Rust on the ESP32 (2019)
Scott Mabin's blog
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Lisp Badge: A single-board computer that you can program in uLisp
The Lisp Badge is a self-contained computer with its own display and keyboard, based on an ATmega1284, that you can program in uLisp: