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Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 165 posts.
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An always-available, online-capable Raspberry Pi in your pocket
These days, I’m building a lot of hardware projects based on the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi mini computer. Especially with the Raspberry Pi Zero W (an even tinier version, with the W denoting the wifi-capable version), you can have one anywhere and can power it from any USB power source.
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Raspberry Pi 4 WiFi stops working at 2560 x 1440 screen resolution
This is part of a series of posts on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick , a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
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How to Measure Indoor Air Quality with a Raspberry Pi, RuuviTags and PMS7003
Learn how to build an air quality monitoring device with a PMS7003 sensor, Raspberry Pi and some Java code. Help raise awareness about air pollution.
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The Last POWER1 CPU on Mars Is Dead
The Opportunity Rover , also known as the Mars Exploration Rover B (or MER-1), has finally been declared at end of mission today after 5,3...
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Cooling off your Raspberry Pi 4
Read up about how you can cool off your Raspberry Pi 4 and drop a few degrees. I compare several cooling solutions including firmware updates.
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Compiling my own SPARC CPU inside a cheap FPGA
Compiling a CPU, in a cheap FPGA board
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The Rise of the Electric Scooter
In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it’s not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much, right? On an electric
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Performance Speed Limits
A laundry list of speed limits that your code can’t exceed.
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Explaining 4K 60Hz Video Through USB-C Hub
USB-C offers exciting new capabilities, including external monitors connected through the USB port. USB-C converters to DisplayPort or HDMI are common and inexpensive. USB-C hubs with external monitor support are also common, but understanding their capabilities and limitations can be extremely confusing. Some are…
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FPGAs Have the Wrong Abstraction for Computing
Verilog is the de facto abstraction for programming today’s FPGAs. RTL programming is fine if you want to use FPGAs for their traditional purpose as circuit emulators, but it’s not the right thing for the new view of FPGAs as general-purpose computational accelerators.
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The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
Like many others, I was quite amazed to learn about a microcontroller sold for only 0.03 USD via the EEVblog last year. How was this possible? Many assumed this was a fire sale of an old product. D…
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Heat Pumps Work Miracles
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 6 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook. ]
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The Sad Saga of Purism and the Librem 5
Today I’m going to tell you a sad tale of a device called the Librem 5 and the company behind it, Purism. As of right now, this story does not have a happy ending. I am writing this series of articles as a protest against the behavior of Purism, a company which claims that transparency and openness are their core…
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The ReMarkable Tablet: A Review
The reMarkable tablet is a 10" e-paper tablet on which you can read PDF and ePub files, and write on with the stylus that comes with the device. It has fundamentally changed how I read textbooks.
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Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU
How we got here After Apple released its (soon-to-be) previous generation Mac Pro, it probably didn't take long for them to realize they had a trash can…
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Open Hardware on Its Own Doesn’t Solve the Trust Problem
A few years ago, Sean ‘xobs’ Cross and I built an open-source laptop, Novena, from the circuit boards up, and shared our designs with the world. I’m a strong proponent of open hardware, because sharing knowledge is sharing power. One thing we didn’t anticipate was how much the press wanted to frame our open hardware…
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How Radar Works
Radar is one of the most versitile sensors we have to determine what is happening in an environment. Some common applications include air traffic control, weather prediction, automated driver assist, astronomy and terrain mapping. Given that these applications have wildy varying requirements on resolution, range and…
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SpaceX Raptor: Methane fueled full-flow staged combustion cycle engine
SpaceX's new raptor engine is a methane fueled full flow staged combustion cycle engine and its so hard to develop, no engine like this has ever flown before!Now this topic can be really intimidating so in order to bring the Raptor engine into context, we’re going to do an overview of a few common types of rocket…
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My Home Lab Server with 20 Cores / 40 Threads and 128 GB Memory
Update fall 2024 I have decided to decomission this machine and it is no longer in use.
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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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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...
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Homebrew Cray-1A
As part two ( see previous attempt ) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking…