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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 141 posts.
The last primary keyboard I’ll use in my life might be the IBM Model M. It’ll probably last me the decades to the day that keyboards should become obsolete. - Kheng Meng, 2018 I just had to start my blog post with that self quote ^^^ but I’m pretty confident it’ll hold true for me. I have owned several keyboards so…
The 76477 Complex Sound Generation chip (1978) provided sound effects for Space Invaders 1 and many other video games . It was also a pop...
The strange story of a rejected batch of transistors at the heart of the world's most iconic drum machine - The Roland TR-808.
Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers Scaife et al., USENIX Security 2018 Until I can get my hands on a Skim Reaper I’m not sure I’ll ever trust an ATM or other expo…
The Zsun Wifi card reader is cheap tiny USB to MicroSD card reader with an integrated wifi chip running Linux, In a nutshell, it is a WiFi access point with more flash (16MB) and RAM (64 MB) than most OpenWrt supported routers. Polish hardware hacker q3k from Warsaw Hackerspace, is a recent and…
A very warm welcome to my most ambitious project to date. In this project I’m going to attempt to design and build a sprite-based graphics accelerator that will function as a co-processor to an MCU. Using cheap off-the-shelf components I’m hoping to achieve a level of gaming performance that compares well to popular…
Oculus Go, like all products, is the result of a series of compromises around cost, schedule, quality, and competence. It is clearly the best standalone VR platform on the market, but anyone …
Building a high performance supercomputer for under £100 (£550 including twelve Fire3s). Parts list, benchmarks and downloadable plans for laser-cutting the acrylic case.
Over the past several months, a handful of people had been complaining that Mercurial's test harness was executing much slower on Macs. But this slowdown seemingly wasn't occurring on Linux or Windows. And not every Mac user experienced the slowness!
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Modern processors execute instructions in parallel in many different ways: multi-core parallelism is just one of them. In particular, processor cores can have several outstanding memory access requests "in flight". This is often described as "memory-level parallelism". You can measure the level of memory-level…
I recently helped repair the card reader for the Computer History Museum's vintage IBM 1401 mainframe. In the process, I learned a lot abou...
The sharpness of a photographic imaging system or of a component of the system (lens, film, image sensor, scanner, enlarging lens, etc.) is characterized by a parameter called Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) , also known as spatial frequency response. We present a unique visual explanation of MTF and how it relates…
IBM's vacuum tube computers of the 1950s were built from pluggable modules, each holding eight tubes and the associated components. I recent...
In this guide I analyse hardware from CPU to SSD and their impact on performance for deep learning so that you can choose the hardware that you really need.
NTP on a Raspberry-Pi - documents configuring a Raspberry Pi for headless operation, configuring NTP for remote monitoring, adding a GPS/PSS device (two discussed), and how well NTP performs in WAN-only, LAN, and PPS configurations.
Is such a thing possible? Turns out it is, and it’s called a Monoscope. I recently got a Raytheon CK1414 Monoscope with a good getter and a working filament–naturally, I decided to fire…
We recently started restoring a Teletype Model 19, a Navy communication system introduced in the 1940s. 14 This Teletype was powered by a b...
To read an updated on this story please click on this link: Chinese Crankshafts for Corvairs, update 2/17/13. If the pictures on this story are small, try clicking on the F5 key at the top of you…
A mysterious full-length sound card recently arrived at the OS/2 Museum. It was clearly manufactured by IBM in 1985, and sports a 20 MHz Texas Instrument TMS32010 DSP (the DSP is the large black DIP chip near the lower left corner, not the ceramic gold cap chip).
The Computer History Museum has two operational IBM 1401 computers used for demos , but a few weeks ago one computer suddenly couldn't prin...
How low we can Go and still do something useful? I recently bought this ridiculously cheap board: I bought it for three reasons. First, I have never dealt (as a programmer) with STM32F0 series. Second, the STM32F10x series is getting old. MCUs belonging to the STM32F0 family are just as cheap if not cheaper and has…
How I upgraded my Macbook's Thunder2 eGPU from a bus-powered GTX 1050 Ti SC to a PSU-powered GTX 1080.
Disclaimer: this, by no means, is not a definitive description of the whole embedded-specific development. This is just a small good practice about interaction with hardware.
Tomu is a super cheap Open Source Hardware 24 MHz ARM computer with 8 KB of RAM and 64 KB of ROM that fits into your USB connector! Of course I had to put Commodore 64 BASIC on it, which can be accessed through the USB-Serial port exposed by the device.
TLDR : My robot cat litter box bricks itself after a set number of washes with each soap cartridge so I reverse engineered and suppressed the verfication process to enable refilling.
Have you ever wondered how your computer knows all the characteristics of your monitor— the supported resolutions, the model, and even the...
