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Northvolt assembles first lithium-ion battery cell at Swedish gigafactory
The cell is the first to have been fully designed, developed and assembled at a gigafactory by a homegrown European battery company.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 391 posts.
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Implant.ARM.iLOBleed.a
HP servers provide a management module called iLO (a.k.a. Integrated Lights-Out), which turns on as soon as the power cable is connected, loading a full-blown proprietary operating system. This module has full access to all the firmware, hardware, software, and operating system installed on the server. In addition to…
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This Year in Embedded Rust
As 2021 draws to a close, we thought we'd take a look back at what's happened over the last year in Embedded Rust, both within the working group and in the larger community.
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Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
Just recently, there was a surge in traffic to my old legacy dial-up sounds pages. While I did my best with the equipment I had at the time to capture the sound of dial-up modems, I always knew tha…
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The state of external retina displays
The monitor story for Apple computers in [nearly] 2022 is basically would you like garbage, or would you like to take out a home equity loan?
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Quick and dirty way to rip an eBook from Android
I recently purchased a book for my MSC which was only available via a crappy Android app. There was no obvious way to decrypt it to read on a more sensible device, so I resorted to the ancient art of screenscraping. This is a quick-and-dirty way to grab images of the pages and convert them to a standard PDF using…
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Mico: A PDM to USB Microphone Based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040
Using RP2040 to create a USB audio microphone.
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Reverse-engineering a tiny 1980s chip that plays Christmas tunes
For the holidays, I decapped a chip that plays three Christmas melodies. The UM66T melody chip from the 1980s was designed for application...
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Practical Transformer Winding (2010)
Instructions on how to design, calculate and build power transformers.
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Apple to Apple Comparison: M1 Max vs. Intel
Unum builds the Search, Storage, and Networking engines powering the modern data stack. Deployed on 100M+ devices, our technology serves DBMS unicorns and frontier AI labs.
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Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS
Earlier this year, I pitted the $549 ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4 NAS against a homebrew $350 Raspberry Pi CM4 NAS, and came to the (rather obvious) conclusion that the Lockerstor was better in almost every regard. Well, ASUSTOR introduced a new lower-cost NAS, the $329 Drivestor 4 Pro (model AS3304T—pictured above), and sent…
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Upgrading a motherboard’s BIOS/UEFI (the hard way)
A couple of weeks ago I found a really good deal on a Socket AM4 motherboard that supports the newest AMD Ryzen CPUs. The motherboard is an ASRock A520M/ac . It’s a very basic motherboard which doesn’t appear to be sold by any of the usual retailers anymore, but I couldn’t pass up on the deal, especially with the…
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Writing embedded firmware using Rust
AnyLeaf Articles: Writing embedded firmware using Rust
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There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
It took a while, but I finally managed to create my own Game Boy cartridge. With WiFi! At this point, it can only demo a simple telnet-style communication and access Wikipedia articles, but I am confident that I will showcase more in the future. For now, the interesting and surprisingly tricky part is how the thing…
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IBM and Samsung Unveil Semiconductor Breakthrough
IBM and Samsung Electronics jointly announced a breakthrough in semiconductor design utilizing a new vertical transistor architecture that demonstrates a path to scaling beyond nanosheet, and has the potential to reduce energy usage by 85 percent.
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Pine64 and Radxa's new Pi CM4-compatible boards
Since the Raspberry Pi was introduced, hundreds of clones have adopted the Pi's form factor (from the diminutive Zero to the 'full size' model B). Often they have better hardware specs, and yet they remain a more obscure also-ran in that generation of Single Board Computer (SBC). So when I saw Radxa's CM3 and Pine64's…
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Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W external antenna mod
We've barely scratched the surface of the Pi Zero 2's capabilities. [Brian Dorey] shows us how to hack your Pi's WiFi and improve its performance. A u.FL footprint can be discovered in line with the onboard WiFi antenna, implying that someone had to connect an external antenna.
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Fixing a Tiny Corner of the Supply Chain
No product gets built without at least one good supply chain war story – especially true in these strange times. Before we get into the details of the story, I feel it’s worth understanding a bit more about the part that caused me so much trouble: what it does, and why it’s so special.
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Apple’s Newest OLED Supplier
BOE Technology
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Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 4: how algorithms are implemented
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses two custom digital chips to generate sou...
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Yamaha DX7 reverse-engineering, part III: Inside the log-sine ROM
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer for 1980s pop music. It used two custom digital chips to generate so...
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Miniature 3456 LED Cube
For some reason, I’m intrigued by LEDs. Indeed, they can be found in pretty much all of my projects. I was recently inspired by one of Greg Davill’s projects, a miniature LED cube boasting a total of 3456 LEDs . After pondering about it for a while, I decided I’d attempt building one myself. This post describes the…
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Ikea Vindriktning Air Quality Sensor Review and Accuracy
How accurate is Ikea's Vindriktning air quality sensor? This review covers PM2.5 behavior, limitations, and how it compares with better monitors.
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Colour-changing magnifying glass gives clear view of infrared light
By trapping light into tiny crevices of gold, researchers have coaxed molecules to convert invisible infrared into visible light, creating new low-cost detectors for sensing.
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Graviton2 and Graviton3
What do modern cloud workloads look like? And what does that have to do with new chip designs? I found these gems in Peter DeSantis's ReInve...
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ADSL works over wet string (2017)
Broadband services are a wonderful innovation of our time, using multiple frequency bands (hence the name) to carry signals over wires (us...