Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,046 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
Building my first mechanical keyboard
A friend of mine recently brought up his custom mechanical keyboard while we were hanging out in voice chat, and at first, nobody understood why anyone would buy one. At that time, I had no clue that there are entire communities about building custom keyboards. With every sentence that was said, we got deeper into…
The anatomy of a smart bulb
I’ve been having some troubles with Zigbee. Yes, at our airbnb we have a rather big dining room where I’ve put 7 Zigbee RGBWW Smart bulbs. The problem is that each time I try to turn all 7 on or off there’s either a lag or some of them just won’t switch on or off. The controller is a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB dongle, yes…
Hidden Cam Above Bluetooth Pump Skimmer
Tiny hidden spy cameras are a common sight at ATMs that have been tampered with by crooks who specialize in retrofitting the machines with card skimmers. But until this past week I’d never heard of hidden cameras being used at gas pumps in tandem with Bluetooth-based card skimming devices.
A look at power on the new M1 Max
The ramblings and experiments of a software engineer and tech enthusiast based in Dublin.
Windows 7 x64 Extended Support Page
Windows 7 ESU extended support for all Windows 7 users out there!
Replacing the bad flyback transformer in Apple's Studio Display 17"
Content Warning: usage of Dremel, bad soldering, bad desoldering, underestimating high voltage, Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field
The Connection Machines CM-1 and CM-2 (2015)
Thirty years after its launch in 1987, a CM-2 was acquired by MoMA NY. It is only on display in selected shows - its inaugural exhibit was in " Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-1989"
Pi 5 overclocking: Silicon Lottery
Silicon lottery. Now that the Raspberry Pi 5s been readily available (at least in most regions) for a few months, more people started messing with clocks, trying to get the most speed possible out of their Pi 5s. Unlike the Pi 4, the Pi 5 is typically comfortable at 2.6 or even 2.8 GHz, and some Pi 5s can hit 3.0 GHz…
Can you figure out how this single part boost converter works?
If you think this is easy, then I think you are missing something. This is hard. You need to know your hardware intimately to figure this one out.
Meshtastic: A Review
The Meshtastic is my solarpunk dream—a cheap, encrypted, offgrid communicator. But the project is still in the alpha stages (and it shows).
Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 6: the control registers
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produ...
When Serial Isn't RS-232, Geocaching with the Garmin GPS 95
Connecting a Garmin GPS 95 to a Flipper Zero, the serial adventures along the way, and finding the Netherland's first Geocache.
Rethinking software testing: perspectives from the world of hardware (2019)
The conventional view of Software Testing The hardware and software worlds may seem poles apart, and in many ways, they indeed are. But there’s a wealth of knowledge that each can learn from the ot…
Ideas for Raspberry Pi Projects
 Ideas for your Raspberry Pi!The chances are you have a Raspberry Pi or there's one on the way to you, n
Software woven into wire: Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer
Onboard the Apollo spacecraft, the revolutionary Apollo Guidance Computer helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. One of the f...
Modchips of the State
Collection of my projects and hacks.
Inside the ALU of the 8085 microprocessor
The arithmetic-logic unit is a fundamental part of any computer, performing addition, subtraction, and logic operations, but how it works i...
Tiny FORTH from scratch in 1 week (bootloader-based Arduino UNO, 2K of RAM)
Building a tiny FORTH for an Arduino UNO in one week
RISC on a Chip: David Patterson and Berkeley RISC-I
David Patterson and team at UC Berkeley give RISC its name and make the first RISC microprocessor design.
The Core Memory Module from my dad’s homebuilt PDP-11/05
This is basically the 1974 version of a DIMM. It measures 16″ by 11.5″ and holds 16 kilobytes. It’s technically 18 bits wide but only 16 were used in the PDP-11. The raised part in the middle is where the cores are actually stored. Each bit is a little ring with 3 wires running through the middle. By running current…
Inside the 1040ST
1MB and more
Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre
The Atari 520ST was released in the US in July 1985, but because Atari did not provide magazines with pre-production models (like Commodore did with the Amiga), it took a while before magazine reviews appeared.