New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,807 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
Everything you need to know to design your own CNC router
This is the encyclopedic blog post I wish I could have read when I started designing my CNC router.
Amazon Echo Flex Teardown: The Big Silicon
Teardown and analysis of electronics. Integrated circuit design analysis.
Tiny PDP11 on an ESP32
2020 has been a weird year, for everyone around the world. In my specific case, that meant being away from my home in Shanghai, as we were in Europe at the time Covid hit and China did not make it easy to return until somewhere towards the end of the year.
Apple M1 Assembly Language Hello World
Introduction Last week, we talked about using a new Apple M1 based Macintosh as a development workstation and how installing Apple’s development system XCode also installed a large number of open s…
Intel is dying and we can’t save it
How I realized that this is truly the end of the Intel era.
Cheap and simple way to mount a smartphone directly above a laptop display
with David Santiano, Deyin Mia Zhang, Xinran Azena Fan, and Yunru Casey Pan, NYU Shanghai; Barak Chamo, New York; Paolo Salvagione…
Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional
Teardown and analysis of electronics. Integrated circuit design analysis.
Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?
It wasn't my intent to have this next post be about locating a source of a transmitter - but the temptation proved irresistible. Over the pa...
The Confusing World of USB
For decades, my perception of USB was that of a technology both simple and reliable. You plug it and it works. The two first iterations [1] [2] freed PCs from a badly fragmented connector world made of RJ-45 (Ethernet), DA-15 (Joystick), DE-9 (Serial), DIN (PS/2), SCSI, and DB-25 (Parallel). When USB-3.0 came out…
The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
I started a new job recently so I had the opportunity to get one of the new M1 MacBooks, I decided to go with the Air. The reviews have been very positive and I’m here to tell you: it is indeed an amazing device. The performance feels a lot better than my MacBook Pro 16”, which is only a year old and about 3x the…
Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
Yesterday while surfing the ASCII highways of IRC (yes, IRC) a URL linking to a MacOS application scrolled by my screen. Unclack is a small MacOS utility which silences the microphone of the user when they’re typing. The purpose is to prevent the noise of typing being passed through to other participants when on a…
CVE-2021-3011: Key recovery on Google Titan Key
Download the Writeup Illustration made by Romain Flamand Abstract The Google Titan Security Key is a FIDO U2F hardware device proposed by Google (available since July 2018) as a two-factor authentication token to sign in to applications (e.g. your Google account). Our work describes a side-channel attack that targets…
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I
Apple’s latest line of Macs includes their in-house “M1” system-on-chip, featuring a custom GPU. This poses a problem for those of us in the Asahi Linux project who wish to run Linux on our devices, as this custom Apple GPU has neither public documentation nor open source drivers. Some speculate it might descend from…
Shooting photos with an IMAX projector lens
What the heck is that huge lens? That Crazy Huge Lens is an IMAX Lens. You will be surprised at the cool street portraits we got with this thing. Take a look at how Jay P rigged this with his Canon EOS R camera and the amazing results. This is Jay P Morgan. Today on
Memory access on the Apple M1 processor
When a program is mostly just accessing memory randomly, a standard cost model is to count the number of distinct random accesses. The general idea is that memory access is much slower than most other computational tasks. Furthermore, the cost model can be extended to count "nearby" memory accesses as free. That is…
2021 GPS Accuracy Issue Impacting Some Garmin, Suunto, other GPS Devices
Update: As of Sunday morn...
Getting Started in Robotics
People sometimes ask me for robotics resources. There aren’t many high quality internet-first lists available on this topic, so I made one I can link to. I’ll continually update this list so feel free to give suggestions if things are missing or you have better links .
The World's current and next Innovations depend on a single country, Taiwan
The world’s current and next innovations depend on a single country: Taiwan. It’s probably one country you might never hear about, or perhaps confuse with its neighbor, Thailand, or even think it’s a part of China. I’ve been living in Taiwan for 3+ years, and am baffled that I never pay attention to semiconductors…
The Design of the Roland Juno Syntheziser's Oscillators
A comprehensive deep dive into the design of Roland's legendary DCO
PyPy Project looking for sponsorship to add support for Apple Silicon
Looking for sponsorship Apple now ships Macs which are running on an arm64 variant machine with the latest version of MacOS, Big Sur M1. ...
Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range
As you were browsing something about your browser made us think you were a bot. There are a few reasons this might happen:
Flow Browser Preview on the Raspberry Pi 400
We’re very excited to be making a Flow preview available for public download on the Raspberry Pi 400.