1021
Write up of my homebrew CPU build
The blog of an engineer from Canada
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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,045 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
1022
Kohler Can Access Pictures from "End-to-End Encrypted" Toilet Camera
Claimed end-to-end privacy doesn’t fully conceal your rear-end data
1023
News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development
On Thursday, three of the lead Raspberry Pi engineers hosted an AMA on the r/engineering subreddit. Raspberry Pi 6 One of the most interesting tidbits was on the Pi 6. Looking back at previous launches: 2012: Raspberry Pi 2015: Raspberry Pi 2 (+3 years) 2016: Raspberry Pi 3 (+1 year) 2019: Raspberry Pi 4 (+3 years)…
1024
General purpose MCUs built in to LEDs emulate candle flicker
Years ago I spent some time analyzing Candle-Flicker LEDs that contain an integrated circuit to mimic the flickering nature of real candles. Artificial candles have evolved quite a bit since then, …
1025
Why You Can't Build a Smartphone
Every day or so I read another blog post (or ranting comments) about how BlackBerry could be rehabilitated, or how Nokia could restart Maemo and build the ultimate smartphone again. Things came to a head after Jolla announced their first phone for sale. Surely this phone with an amazing user interface will vindicate…
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How does macOS manage virtual cores on Apple Silicon?
Code run in a lightweight Virtual Machine can’t take advantage of the Efficiency cores of the host Apple silicon Mac. How then does Sonoma handle its threads?
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Trying out the Pinebook Pro – a $200 ARM Laptop
The Pinebook Pro is a $200 laptop with ARM processors that promises a lot. Does it deliver?
1030
Unauthenticated RCE on a RIGOL oscilloscope
I work in a company that uses custom electronic boards, so there are plenty of instruments floating around that electrical engineers employ to debug faulty connections and solderings. One kind of tools used are the oscilloscopes, tools that measure signals and plot them in a graphically understandable way. We have a…
1031
APFS in Detail
Apple announced a new file system that will make its way into all of its OS variants (macOS, tvOS, iOS, watchOS) in the coming years. Media coverage to this…
1032
It's hard to build an oscillator
Especially if you want it to work.
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Raspberry Pi 4 as a USB-C peripheral
I’ve previously blogged about using Pi Zero (and Zero W) devices as USB Gadgets. This allows them to be powered and accessed via one of the micro USB sockets and it shows up as both a CD-Driv…
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Raspberry Pi 4 PCIe bridge “chip”
After seeing the work done by Thomasz Mloduchowski and Colin Riley with managing to bridge the Raspberry Pi 4's PCI-Express bus to a USB 3.0 port, and then seeing these comments on hack-a-day, I thought I would give it a go too! So, here's a PCIe bridge chip that simply replaces the VL805 USB 3.
1037
Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop
Laptop makers have long shortchanged AMD-based offerings. Read on to find out how they can avoid common mistakes that limit the potential of their products.
1038
Teardown: A Generic 7-Port USB 3.0 Hub That Wasn't
The recent end-of-financial-year sales were rather interesting – I found myself spending a lot more time browsing AliExpress than I did Amazon or eBay this year which is something I wouldn…
1039
Reverse engineering a counterfeit 7805 voltage regulator
Update: It turns out my 7805 isn't counterfeit. eclectro did an in-depth search ( details on reddit ) and found an old 7805 datasheet fro...
1040
Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
A Raspberry Pi is great if you have a need for which it excels. GPIO, extremely low power requirements, tight space constraints. But the Pi should not be the first thing you reach for when “U…
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Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet
There’s no doubt that cloud computing is the future of IT infrastructure. Its scalability, ease of access and capacity for analysing vast amounts of data has made it integral to how businesses, organizations, and end-users use the internet.
1044
Receiving images of Earth from satellites with software defined radio
FM radio headphones were given out at the door. Each set was tuned beforehand to receive a broadcast from my programmed station. Visitors were then invited to walk around the room, contemplating the artifacts of the exhibit.
1045
FPGA Based IBM-PC-XT
Recently I undertook a hobby project to recreate an IBM XT Personal Computer from the 1980s using a mix of authentic parts and modern technology. I had a clear goal in mind: I wanted to be able to …
1046
Rust (and Slint) on a Jailbroken Kindle
I recently jailbroke my 7th generation Kindle Paperwhite. While my motivation probably should have been "breaking free from Amazon's clammy and tightening grip", the truth is I wanted a way to use it as a clock on my nightstand. I found this project and figured I could just make some adjustments to the code. And that…
1047
An M1 for Curl
A generous member of the wider curl community stepped up and donated an unused Mac mini m1 model to me to be used for curl development. Today it arrived at my home. An 8C CPU/16GB/1TB/8C GPU/1GbE model as per the sticker on the box. The m1 mac mini, still wrapped in plastic. Apple is not … Continue reading An m1 for…
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Apollo Guidance Computer switching power supply works after 50 years
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer, the revolutionary computer that helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. 1 At...