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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,045 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM
My micro site, zero.btxx.org , is being served to the public internet from a Raspberry Pi Zero v1.3 running Alpine Linux.
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Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
Now that we’ve covered the contenders for this test, I will cover how this test will be performed and go through the results. It was a long time for me, but for you, it’ll just be a few…
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Voder Speech Synthesizer
A web emulation of Bell Labs VODER speech synthesizer from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair.
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Hosting a website on an 8-bit microcontroller
My victim is the AVR64DD32 which is quite similar to the Atmega328 of Arduino fame. Compared to the older Atmega, these AVR DD lines are cheaper for the same memory, use a single programming pin and have nicer peripherals:
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My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4
I have been using a MacBook Pro M4 as my portable computer for the last half a year and wanted to share a few short impressions. As always, I am not a professional laptop reviewer, so in this article you won’t find benchmarks, just subjective thoughts!
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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...
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The quiet resurgence of RF engineering
I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it wa...
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A 60 GHz phased array for $10
In 2018, I gave an talk at Hackaday Supercon that was basically Phased Arrays 101. You can watch it at the bottom of this post.
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The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
Like many others, I was quite amazed to learn about a microcontroller sold for only 0.03 USD via the EEVblog last year. How was this possible? Many assumed this was a fire sale of an old product. D…
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Designing an Ethernet Switch ASIC
Designing the world's first open source Ethernet switch ASIC. An unmanaged cut-through 3-port 100Mbps switch fabbed on Global Foundries 180 nm.
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Heat Pumps Work Miracles
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 6 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook. ]
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The Sad Saga of Purism and the Librem 5
Today I’m going to tell you a sad tale of a device called the Librem 5 and the company behind it, Purism. As of right now, this story does not have a happy ending. I am writing this series of articles as a protest against the behavior of Purism, a company which claims that transparency and openness are their core…
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The ReMarkable Tablet: A Review
The reMarkable tablet is a 10" e-paper tablet on which you can read PDF and ePub files, and write on with the stylus that comes with the device. It has fundamentally changed how I read textbooks.
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Transforming a QLC SSD into an SLC SSD
In today's article, we're embarking on something unprecedented! We'll guide you step by step through the process of transforming an SSD equipped with QLC NANDs into an SLC SSD, significantly enhancing its durability and overall performance!
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Reverse-engineering the TL431: the most common chip you’ve never heard of (2014)
This article is now available in Russian: Реверс-инжиниринг TL431, крайне распространенной микросхемы, о которой вы и не слышали . A die p...
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Bitcoin mining on a vintage Xerox Alto: very slow at 1.5 hashes/second
I've been restoring a Xerox Alto minicomputer from the 1970s and figured it would be interesting to see if it could mine bitcoins. I coded u...
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Apple’s Universal Control
Apple’s “Universal Control” is holy-shit good
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Why are McDonald’s Self Service Kiosks so hackable?
McDonalds in Australia do a decent cup of coffee. It’s not great but it’s consistently decent so I often start my day with a cup. Due to my travels around Australia in a decked out van I have seen how many McDonalds operate and just how many of
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60 kHz (2022)
It’s WWVB, the station that the National Institute of Standards and Technology uses to broadcast the current time, tuned to the 60 kHz frequency. Day and night, this station diligently continues broadcasting.
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Counterfeit Macbook charger teardown: convincing outside but dangerous inside
What's inside a counterfeit Macbook charger? After my Macbook charger teardown , a reader sent me a charger he suspected was counterfeit. ...
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Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022
Magic Leap 2 Presentation Was the Hit of the Conference Kevin Curtis (Curtis), Magic Leap’s VP of Optical Engineering, presentation “Unveiling Magic Leap 2’s Advanced AR Platform and Re…
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Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
I spent years building one of the most popular LED strip visualizers on GitHub. It's the kind of project that's easy to get started but diabolically hard to master.
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If you watch closely enough, everything is a speaker
Using high speed cameras, it’s possible to record the vibrations of everyday objects caused by nearby sounds and reverse engineer the sounds…essentially turning
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μWWVB: A Tiny WWVB Station
μWWVB is a watch stand that automatically sets the time on atomic wristwatches where regular WWVB signal isn't available.
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Home lab beginners guide (2021)
My home lab in a 12U rack as of March 2026. What is a Home Lab? Think of a home lab as a place where you can fail in the privacy of your own home. As
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How SpaceX streamlined the Raptor engine
If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you’ve seen this famous image of three iterations of SpaceX’s Raptor rocket engine.
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Why libvirt supports only 14 PCIe hotplugged devices on x86-64
You might have used libvirt , a Linux daemon that provides an abstraction and management layer for virtualization software. This daemon allows you to submit an XML file containing a description of a VM, disk image or network. libvirt is then able to configure, start it and keep it running.