271
What makes a good smartphone camera?
There are lots of things that affect the quality of photographs. The biggest one is the skill of the photographer behind the camera.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 296 posts.
272
ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine
My complete guide for setting up the ASRock BC-250. You can’t beat its price for performance, and it’s perfect for those who love tinkering with projects.
273
Patching the Wii News Channel to serve local news (2025)
In keeping with my passion (?) for displaying local news articles in unexpected places , I figured it would be a fun project to try and see what it would take to display current local news on the Nintendo Wii console’s News Channel .
274
Playing Atari ST Music on the Amiga with Zero CPU
How to emulate an Atari YM2149 audio chip on Amiga at litteraly 0 CPU cost, by Arnaud Carré
275
The History of ThinkPad: From IBM’s Bento Box to Lenovo’s AI Workstations
A sourced history of ThinkPad from IBM's 1992 700C to Lenovo's 2026 AI workstations: TrackPoint, keyboards, X-series, T-series and P-series.
276
Using Blu-ray M-Disk as backup of last resort
In my previous blog post I talked about how I bought a Blu-ray drive and a couple of M-Discs to use it for long-term archival backups.
277
Sony Data Discman
Let's look at this little gizmo Sony produced in the early 1990s.
278
I built a pint-sized Macintosh
To kick off MARCHintosh, I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico: This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040). The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a…
279
Hacking with Claude on a $27 smart watch
The Pine Time is a $27 smart watch that runs open source firmware. I’ve had one sitting in the back of a drawer for a...
280
TCXO Failure Analysis
Back in January, the ThunderScope team sent me a PCIe card version of their prototype open hardware oscilloscope.
281
Notes on the Intel 8086 processor's arithmetic-logic unit
In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors,...
282
Fixing analog audio on the $2.58 HDMI-to-VGA adapter
Adventures in programming, hardware, DSP, and chiptune
283
IRIX 3dfx Voodoo driver and glide2x IRIX port
At the moment only SST1 (Voodoo1) is supported on IP32 (O2). Only tested on IRIX 6.5.30 with RM7000C CPU. -driver sources (SST1 and CVG support on IP32) https://github.com/sdz-mods/tdfx_irix -glide2x IRIX port (SST1 on IP32) https://github.com/sdz-mods/glide_irix -hinv wrapper with 3dfx support…
284
ZX Spectrum: Experimenting with 1-Bit Sound
As part of the ZX Spectrum tour, I implemented some routines that would let you play simple tones out of the 1-bit beeper. These were in large part inspired by earlier work I did on the Apple II. W…
285
The Z80 Membership Card (2015)
The microcomputer is an incredible, revolutionary invention. Like the electric light, the printing press, and the wheel, it has changed the world. Without microcomputers, the internet, and perhaps even "life as we know it" would not be possible!
286
80386 Multiplication and Division
When Intel released the 80386 in October 1985, it marked a watershed moment for personal computing. The 386 was the first 32-bit x86 processor, increasing the register width from 16 to 32 bits and vastly expanding the address space compared to its predecessors. This wasn't just an incremental upgrade—it was the…
287
The Serial TTL connector we deserve
Goodbye dangling Dupont pins, hello Julet E-Bike connector. I have them now everywhere, from my router to my servers.
288
I built a 10 inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions
I built a 10-inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions and I had a lot of fun doing it. I want to share my build in this post.
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A PCB business card with a batteryless LED, powered by the phone that taps it
I made a circuit-board business card that opens my website and lights an LED with power harvested from the phone tapping it.
291
Train Simulator Controller
From January to July 2026, I have continued to work on my UK Class 800-inspired train simulator. There are a number of components in progress, but few newly completed: in lieu of posts about completed portions of the simulator, here’s a roundup of progress across the different hardware aspects of the project.
292
Quasi-Logarithmic Kitchen Timer
Like some of you, we have several kitchen appliances with integrated digital timers.
293
Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
I bought an NVIDIA DGX Spark! It's actually quite a competent general purpose computer while being super tiny and power efficient. It basically just has an ARM CPU, a decent NVIDIA GPU (with the same number of CUDA cores as the RTX 5070), 128 GB of unified memory, and a 4 TB SSD.
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The Secret Life of Circuits is now in stock everywhere
For the past couple of weeks, you could get my latest book — The Secret Life of Circuits — directly from the publisher.
296
Probably check on your smart appliances
TL;DR: is your refrigerator running malware? If so, you better catch it!