1681
FreeBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad
Compatibility of FreeBSD on a Lenovo Thinkpad T480, notes and fixes (HiDPI, Trackpad, camera, etc).
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
1682
What every programmer should know about solid-state drives (2014)
This is Part 6 over 6 of "Coding for SSDs". For other parts and sections, you can refer to the Table to Contents. This is a series of articles that I wrote to share what I learned while documenting myself on SSDs, and on how to make code perform well on SSDs. In this part,
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I’m putting a WiFi router into a wall charger
Read the updated story here
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Memory bandwidth
Absolute memory bandwidth figures tend to look fairly large, especially for GPUs. This is deceptive. It’s much more useful to relate memory bandwidth to say the number of clock cycles or inst…
1685
Choosing an op-amp for your project
Just say no to LM741 and LM324 / LM358.
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The Odd Story of Factory-Downgraded 486s (2020)
Counterfeits CPU were very common in the mid-90s. The worst period was between 1993 (just after the launch of the Intel 486 DX2) and 1998 (when the Pentium II started to be multiplier-locked). It was extremely easy for tricksters to remove the original marking and reprint another one with a higher f
1688
Understanding the iPhone 6 Plus Screen
An experiment to understand how the discrepancy between logical and native screen dimensions on the iPhone 6 Plus affects rendering quality.
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Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry
In 1985, Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor, the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture. To improve performance, the ...
1690
Building my own 64GB memory card with a $6 eMMC chip (2016)
As seen on Hackaday! There’s always some electronics topic that I end up focusing all my efforts on (at least for a certain time), and that topic is now eMMC NAND Flash memory. Overview eMMC …
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Electric motor scaling laws and inertia in robot actuators
Engineering contraptions
1693
The Physics of GPS
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
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HDMI Light V2: Open-Hardware FPGA-Based Clone of Philips Ambilight (2014)
It’s been over a year since I created the first version of my Ambilight clone , but I finally found the time to return to it and add some new features. I was originally planning on adding colour correction (to correct for the purple wall behind my TV) and output delay (to get perfect synchronisation with the TV), but…
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RISC-V from scratch 2: Hardware layouts, linker scripts, and C runtimes
A post describing how C programs get to the main function. Devicetree layouts, linker scripts, minimal C runtimes, GDB and QEMU, basic RISC-V assembly, and other topics are reviewed along the way.
1696
Faster zlib/DEFLATE decompression on the Apple M1 (and x86)
DEFLATE is a relatively slow compression algorithm from 1991, which (along with its wrapper format, zlib) is incredibly widely used, for example in the PNG, Zip and Gzip file formats and the HTTP, …
1697
PWM flicker: Invisible light that's harming our health?
I recently spent a few weeks running a conference for a community of researchers and writers in a historic chateau in the French…
1698
I Replaced My MacBook Pro with a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB for a Day
Earlier this week, as part of my work doing a more complete review of the Raspberry Pi 4 (coming soon!), I decided I'd go all-in and spend one entire day working entirely (or at least as much as possible) from a Raspberry Pi. And not just doing some remote coding sessions or writing a blog post—that's easy to do on a…
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The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A
It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at an architecture that’s completely new to me, and I haven’t done any since creating my new scheme for dedicated platform guides. I’…
1700
Inside a $34 smartphone
This Huami H3 smartphone cost me $34US (210RMB) in January. It's sold with a 5 inch screen, Bluetooth, WiFi, 4G cell connectivity, Android 4.4 and an 8 core processor.
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Designing a Low Latency 10G Ethernet Core (2023)
View the code on GitHub
1703
Imaging a Hard Drive with Non-ECC Memory – What Could Go Wrong?
I recently came home to visit with family, but right now as I write this, it's 1:00am and I'm running memtest86+ by myself in the basement.
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Error Handling in Baby Toys
Electrical baby toys are interesting to disassemble and look at how it’s made. Not up to the …
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Reverse engineering a forgotten 1970s Intel dual core beast: 8271, a new ISA
" As I recall, those two chips were fairly large. And fairly late -- to the marketplace. We had lots of issues with them. [...] Sometimes th...
1707
Long range WiFi antenna from Illy coffee can
I have a stack of half finished projects that I'm trying to complete. Happily, the first one was finished late last night: a long range Wi...
1708
Building a Networked Key-Value-Store on an FPGA
This post is about building an FPGA based networked key-value-store in the functional hardware description language Clash. I’ll describe my FPGA-tailored hashtable design, the testing framework I built for it, and its performance and resource usage.
1709
Inside a Titan missile guidance computer
I've been studying the guidance computer from a Titan II nuclear missile. This compact computer was used in the 1970s to guide a Titan II ...
1710
Analysis of Soviet smoke detector plutonium
Technical nuclear forensics-themed discussion of the age, activity, and grade of plutonium found in a KI-1 Soviet smoke detector.