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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
I unlocked Hypervisor.framework on my jailbroken phone and modified UTM, a popular QEMU port for iOS, to run arm64 Linux in a VM at full native speed. …for the clickbait - and to show iPhone’s untapped potential.
I like to tinker. My wife picked me up the new Raspberry Pi Zero. It's an ultra small and ridiculously cheap computer. How small and cheap? They give it away free on the cover of magazines... Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf you hurry down to WHSmith in Oxford, there are still a few @TheMagP1 copies left.❤️ 3💬 0🔁…
Designing and soldering a small ARM Linux board with 217 ball BGA package and 0402 passive components
Apple Silicon changes everything for Broadway electronic music designers. The new M1 Mac mini is capable of running high-end sample libraries and virtual instruments in a stable manner, and it's only going to get better with M2, M3, and M4-series chips in the future.
On the way to the Apple Store today to buy AppleCare+ for my wife’s new iPhone 5, we passed the new Microsoft Store , coincidentally in the middle of their Surface with Windows RT launch. (That is actually the product’s name. “Surface with Windows RT”.)
What happens if you give the Intel 8086 processor an instruction that doesn't exist? A modern microprocessor (80186 and later) will gener...
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…
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…
I want to say thank you to all the people who sent condolences following last week’s post, especially those who shared their own stories of loss.
When most people hear Apple in a sentence, their next thought is likely the color. Does Apple Silicon M1 output “billion colors”?
I keep designing physical parts for our robots. Motor mounts, sensor brackets, wheel hubs. Every time, the workflow is the same: open a GUI CAD program, click a
A comprehensive deep dive into the design of Roland's legendary DCO
Yesterday, during OsmoDevCon 2018, Steve Markgraf released osmo-fl2k, a new Osmocom member project which enables the use of FL2000 USB-VGA adapters as ultra-low-cost SDR transmitters. How does it wor
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
I stopped working on the reverse-engineered Apple Neural Engine (ANE) driver three years ago, upon a sad mini realization that the ANE block is just not that useful, and I could be doing more useful things, and moved onto upstreaming other, more useful, blocks. The ANE's architecture was too opinionated to build a…
We've been archiving a bunch of old Xerox Alto disk packs from the 1970s. A few of them turned out to be password-protected, so I needed ...
Do you know how a hard drive works? Come find out with me as I dump, reverse engineer, and modify the firmware on various HDDs and SSDs.
Update fall 2024 I have decided to decomission this machine and it is no longer in use.
Summary : Steve Jobs's NeXT computer company made a keyboard in 1988. With no prior electronics experience, I tried to get it to work over USB. To do so, I had to go way deeper than I ever expected - all the way back over 100 years to broadcast radio standards from the 1920s. I learned tons and tons, and had a lot of…
On this blog, I’ve been rambling on about lock-free programming subjects such as acquire and release semantics and weakly-ordered CPUs. I’ve tried to make these …
Learn how to monitor airplane traffic with a Raspberry Pi. Track real-time flight data using PiAware and an ADS-B dongle. Simple setup for aviation enthusiasts!
Alexei's pile o'stuff, featuring writing on software development, travel, photography, and more.
This week I returned from a business trip overseas for the past few weeks. This is why I haven't been able to blog this month until now. But...
Starting with the release of the Pixel 3, all of Google's Pixel Android smartphones come with the Titan M security chip on board. When I realized the Pixel 3a XL I purchased also had it, I decided to try to take advantage of it in an app I work on. It turned out that using the Titan M chip through the Android Keystore…
Last week I wrote a Mandelbrot set program for the Xerox Alto, which took an hour to generate the fractal. The point of this project was to...
Dmitry.GR: Fisher-Price Pixter: From unknown and obscure to fully documented, emulated, and preserved
