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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 243 posts.
Let me start by saying that the reMarkable 2 is a great device. I’ve wanted something like this for a long time: a relatively open device that runs Linux with an eInk screen and the ability to write on that screen with a pen. The reMarkable 2 delivers: I can ssh into it, and there’s a whole bunch of people writing…
This is the encyclopedic blog post I wish I could have read when I started designing my CNC router.
TLDR: My Macbook Pro 16" is hot and noisy when connected to a 2560x1440p60 monitor, even when idle and the lid is closed. This article…
The new $30 AirTag tracking device from Apple has a feature that allows anyone who finds one of these tiny location beacons to scan it with a mobile phone and discover its owner’s phone number if the AirTag has been set to lost mode. But according to new research, this same feature can be abused to redirect the Good…
Dmitry.GR: How to reverse engineer a completely undocumented microcontroller. From nothing to a full SDK in one week flat!
I found this strange looking device at Goodwill yesterday. Originally, owing perhaps to the bright blue color, I thought it was some sort of educational or kids device. It had no branding on it, so…
Surprising sound let down by serious comfort problems
First an apology. I started this project because during the first 9 months of the COVID-19 pandemic business was down to a fraction of what it was before then, and I had a lot of time on my hand. But that has changed now and there is a lot of work in my ‘day job’, so I don’t have a whole lot of time to work on the…
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.) It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building…
For the holidays, I decapped a chip that plays three Christmas melodies. The UM66T melody chip from the 1980s was designed for application...
As we head into another gifting season and more and more connected devices make their way onto gift guides, I want to offer a cautionary note. The smart home is like a cat — mostly self-sufficient and nice to have, but also possessing a mind of its own that can lead to frustration and confusion […]
We’re all familiar with the Mac’s startup chime. While it has changed over the years, it has greeted users with its friendly tone for decades. What you may not know is that for years, the Mac also came with a death sound, that would play when the machine was unable to properly boot. And they are glorious: Macintosh II…
There are many good, modern solutions for reading data off old floppy discs and drives. Perhaps the best is the Greaseweazle : it's capable,...
Ever since the Pi 2 model B went to a 4-core processor, disk IO has often been the primary bottleneck for my Pi projects. You can use microSD cards, which aren't horrible, but... well, nevermind, they're pretty bad as a primary disk. Or you can plug in a USB 3.0 SSD and get decent speed, but you end up with a cabling…
My personal website and blog
In the previous blog post, I looked at the EC firmware in my laptop. This time I will look into the WiFi firmware of the same laptop.
For some reason, I’m intrigued by LEDs. Indeed, they can be found in pretty much all of my projects. I was recently inspired by one of Greg Davill’s projects, a miniature LED cube boasting a total of 3456 LEDs . After pondering about it for a while, I decided I’d attempt building one myself. This post describes the…
An introductory technical analysis of the Yamaha DX7, detailing some of the known information about the synthesiser’s engineering.
Collection of odds and ends relating to e-readers including personal reminisces Background # Reading has been a huge part of my life. The written word has had arguably more of an impact on my life than anything I have experienced in person. As a kid back in early 2000’s; this meant a lot of library trips and saving…
Flash cartridges (= "carts") are commonly used to run Game Boy ROMs, such as homebrew games or dumped officially released games, on real hardware. Different kinds of flash carts with various features and performance characteristics have been available for a long time, but flash carts have in general the reputation of…
aka: how I “accidentally” discovered what I already suspected: optimization methods are at the heart of landing rockets.
People sometimes ask me for robotics resources. There aren’t many high quality internet-first lists available on this topic, so I made one I can link to. I’ll continually update this list so feel free to give suggestions if things are missing or you have better links .
I treat my MacBook Pro laptop very well. It barely has a scratch and it’s never had any accidental drops or damage. Even so, my 4 years of owning it has resulted in:
New Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger delivered a keynote with the right strategy, the right tactics, and most importantly, the right spirit to return Intel to success.
After the disappointment of my X1 Nano and learning that all future Intel "Evo"-branded laptops would lack S3 suspend, I started thinking about returning to my M1 MacBook full-time or building an OpenBSD desktop. I chose the latter, building my first desktop machine in many years.
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became extremely popular, defining the sound of 1980s pop music. Because micro...
It‘s been a couple of days since a friend of mine dropped his iPhone 12 Pro into the canal in Kreuzberg, Berlin. News made it all around the world by now, being featured on all Apple News pages that exist: AppleInsider , 9to5Mac , The Loop , iPhone Ticker , iMore , Hi Tekno , Mac4Ever , Appgefahren , Macerkopf …
