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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 93 posts.
Making a brain for my model plane
I am making a brain for my model plane so that it can fly by itself. I could have bought an off-the-shelf kit but I wanted to build it myself to understand how everything works from the ground up.
From Gongkai to Open Source
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a $12 “Gongkai” cell phone (pictured above) that I stumbled across in the markets of Shenzhen, China. My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping…
HFS+ Bit Rot
HFS+ is a terribly old filesystem with serious flaws. I sincerely hope that Apple comes with an update of the filesystem for WWDC 2015. After all they have been working on Swift for the past 4 years and we have just learned about it last week. HFS+ is seriously old HFS+ was released in 1998, in the era of Mac OS…
Living a High-DPI desktop lifestyle can be painful on Windows
I've been using this Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro for the last few weeks, and lemme tell ...
Adventures in Piano Building
Turning a mouse house into a musical marvel.
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.
Lab Notebook: Single Pixel Camera
Please forgive me for the lack of new content over the last five or so months. After my most recent post about neural networks and quadcopte...
The Guide to Not Buying a 3D Printer
3d printing projects, Ultimaker and other DIY 3d stuff
Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
While I'm a hacker of all kinds of electronics things by night, my day job is being a software developer. That mostly means sitting in front of a computer all day, entering code, debugging, etcetera. You probably can imagine my main weapon of choice to tame all that code is my keyboard: I'm usually happily tapping…
How speakers make sound
Check out Animagraffs on youtube > .
Zusie – My Relay Computer
The story behind Zusie begins in May 2008, when I went on vacation to Berlin for a few days with a friend. As is my habit, I looked for interesting technical or scientific sites to visit, and the main thing to visit was the Technische Museum. I think I spent a full day day there, to the expressed dismay of my friend…
Build your own drink mixing robot
I built a robot that mixes drinks named Bar Mixvah. It utilizes an Arduino microcontroller switching a series of pumps via transistors on the physical layer, and the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.js, Node.js) and jQuery for the frontend and backend. In this post, I’ll teach you how I made it. You can follow…
Building Pulse and Bloom, an interactive biofeedback installation at Burning Man
Samuel Clay is a grad student in the schools of design and of engineering at Harvard. He founded NewsBlur , a personal RSS news reader, and Turn Touch , beautiful control for the smart home.
Homemade Speakers
I had the awesome opportunity of taking the EE423 Speaker Design class offered at USC while I was going to school there. The class is taught by engineers from JBL, with some help from people like Tom Holman (the TH in THX guy!), who happens to be a researcher at USC. I learned a lot about speaker design, and ended up…
Wifi: “beamforming” only begins to describe it
[Note to the impatient: to try out my beamforming simulation, which produced the above image, visit my beamlab test page - ideally in a brow...
Discovery's Teardrop
They are perhaps the most easily recognizable tiles in space shuttle history. For shuttle watchers, when you see them, you know exactly which shuttle you are looking at. Only space shuttles Columbia and Enterprise are more recognizable. The four other shuttles — Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — aside…
Explanation of 44.1 kHz CD sampling rate
The CD sampling rate has to be larger than about 40 kHz to fulfill the Nyquist criterion that requires sampling at twice the maximum analog frequency, which is about 20 kHz for audio. The sampling frequency is chosen somewhat higher than the Nyquist rate since practical filters neede to prevent aliasing have a finite…
Douglas Adams's Mac IIfx
「99歳にもなったら入れる施設なんてあるのだろうか…」こんな悩みを抱えてはいませんか?現代社会は「少子高齢化社会」と呼ばれ、人口に占める高齢者の数が増えてきています。また、医療の発達により寿命はどんどん長くなっており、介護に関する悩みを抱える人も多いのではないでしょうか。
How the Z80's registers are implemented
The 8-bit Z80 microprocessor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The Z80...
Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition review
Please note: I've updated this review in several spots and have highlighted these updates like this . Please also check out the comments-se...