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PCBs, copper pours, ground planes, and you
A closer look at a fashion trend in printed circuit board design.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,044 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
752
Turning AirPods into a fitness tracker
A fun side project for a great cause featuring Core Motion, SwiftUI, a little help from AI, and a pair of AirPods to count 100 push-ups a day.
753
Meta Quest Pro – Bad AR Passthrough
Introduction I have been taking pictures and making short video clips to demonstrate different aspects of the displays and optics of the Meta Quest Pro (MQP) for over a month. It was a bit of an on…
754
California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to students, educators, business
A plain-language guide to AB2047 you can share with your school board, PTA, or neighbor. Learn what's at stake and how to take action.
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Hyundai Head Unit Hacking
Standard-class Gen5 navigation
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Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
The 80386 is the most important CPU Intel ever produced. It confirmed the importance of the x86 line and sparked a computing revolution. And yet it almost never saw the light of day. This is the history of the 386 and why it was such a landmark.
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Eliminating radio interference from Apple charger
Apple's product design teams should do a better job eliminating unwanted radio frequency emissions from their product!
758
RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game?
It turns out, you can attach an external GPU to a Raspberry Pi 5. So my natural first question is, can I game on it? Let’s try it out and compare it with some similar computers. Just a quick FTC required note: When you buy through my links, I may earn a commission. For the showdown of crappy gaming computers, we’ll…
759
Box of Secrets: Discreetly modding an apartment intercom to work with Apple Home
Discreetly modding my friend’s apartment intercom to work with Apple Home.
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Build your own Google TV using Raspberry Pi, Node.js and Socket.io
If you’re connecting to your rPi via SSH, you’d have to update your DISPLAY environment variables by issuing
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Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
This post is a high-level explainer for my Master’s thesis, which involves designing hardware architectures for ultrafast inference and online learning using the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) architecture. I’ll assume familiarity with standard machine learning concepts, as well as some understanding of hardware and…
762
USB Reverse Engineering: Down the Rabbit Hole
Thanks for the featured writeup Hackaday! Make sure to check out the comments over there as well. Looks like Hackernoon picked it up as well, make sure to check in with the comments there too. It would be great if you could also head over to Hacker News, give an upvote, and join in the comments there. Let's get this…
763
Building a software-defined radio from scratch
The FreeSRP is an affordable software-defined radio (SDR) I decided to design because there were no existing options that filled the gap between the $300 and relatively narrow bandwidth and low resolution HackRF and the better performing USRP s you can get for about $700. Of course it will be fully open source, but…
764
Intel N100 Radxa X4 First Thoughts
The Intel N100-based Radxa x4 has taken the headlines over the last week or so, and for good reason! Does the x86 SBC live up to the hype?
765
My Life in E-Ink
Collection of odds and ends relating to e-readers including personal reminisces Background # Reading has been a huge part of my life. The written word has had arguably more of an impact on my life than anything I have experienced in person. As a kid back in early 2000’s; this meant a lot of library trips and saving…
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RISC-V based single board computers are getting there
When putting the Raspberry Pi Zero vs a MangoPi MQ Pro, who wins? Can the RISC-V D1 chip hold its own?
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The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300
And a surviving example of one surfaced in December 2024.
768
Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
Revenge tale against Consumer Electronics "Control".
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Power consumption of Game Boy flash cartridges
Flash cartridges (= "carts") are commonly used to run Game Boy ROMs, such as homebrew games or dumped officially released games, on real hardware. Different kinds of flash carts with various features and performance characteristics have been available for a long time, but flash carts have in general the reputation of…
771
How SpaceX lands Starship (sort of)
aka: how I “accidentally” discovered what I already suspected: optimization methods are at the heart of landing rockets.
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Examining the silicon dies of the Intel 386 processor
You might think of the Intel 386 processor (1985) as just an early processor in the x86 line, but the 386 was a critical turning point for m...
773
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 .
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Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit Satellites
An adventure of the Southern Appalachian Space Agency, by Travis Goodspeed <travis at radiantmachines.com>, as presented at Summercon 2013...
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Drilling down on Uncle Sam's proposed TP-Link ban
The U.S. government is reportedly preparing to ban the sale of wireless routers and other networking gear from TP-Link Systems , a tech company that currently enjoys an estimated 50% market share among home users and small businesses. Experts say while the proposed ban may have more to do with TP-Link’s ties to China…
776
Don't waste money on a math coprocessor they said
Well it’s been no secret, but OS/2 6.123 on my PS/2 model 80, is insanely unstable running simple MS-DOS based games (large EXE’s)
777
Building Ultra Long Range Toslink
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 38th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2024. You can watch the talk that was recorded by the wonderful C3VOC team below if that’s your preferred medium:
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I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome
So this past week has been quite a whirlwind — we wrapped up the Novena campaign and smashed all our stretch goals, concluding with over $700k raised , and I got my hair cut in a bar at midnight by none other than the skilled hands of Lenore of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories ( I blame Jake ! :). It was an…
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Anatomy of a cheap USB-to-Ethernet adapter
Taking apart a very cheap USB to Ethernet adapter and pondering on the parts found inside.
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