91
Two computers, one monitor, zero fiddling (2025)
How to switch inputs between desktop and laptop on one monitor using built-in KVM and DDC
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 296 posts.
92
An ESP32 based plane radar for my desk
Plane radar is a neat little project that pulls nearby ADS-B traffic, plots each aircraft by distance and bearing, and shows the details directly on a cute little screen.
93
Why E cores make Apple silicon fast
Apple silicon architecture is designed to get background processes out of the way of our apps running in the foreground, by using the E cores.
94
I built my own hair electrolysis machine
Axiom: body hair is cringe. That's how I feel, at least. I decided to build a machine that lets me permanently remove it using electricity.
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A beginner's guide to split keyboards
Come to the dark side, we have keyboard shaped cookies.
97
Camera Chase Vehicle
You stumble on a weird robot chassis in an industrial warehouse. Its adorable, enormous and will likely be scrapped.
98
The intracies of modern camera lens repair (2024)
I stumbled across a broken Sigma 45mm f/2.8 Art lens for a very cool $58.65 USD that I simply could not resist. I've been eyeing an AF lens in the 50mm range for my recent endeavors with L-mount cameras and this looked like the perfect fit. This lens is commonly found as a kit with the very excellent full-frame Sigma…
99
Unlocking a locked/deactivated e-waste Cricut Maker
How I returned a Cricut Maker back to service after Cricut remotely bricked the unit
100
Notes on Apple's Nano Texture (2025)
2024 Nano Texture Macbook Pro on the left; 2021 Glossy Macbook Pro on the right TLDR: the Nano Texture performs wonderfully anywhere where light used to be a factor and used to force me to shade my screen or avoid the place entirely. I’m less concerned with where I sit indoors. Coffee shops / offices with skylights or…
101
Raspberry Pi's New AI Hat Adds 8GB of RAM for Local LLMs
Today Raspberry Pi launched their new $130 AI HAT+ 2 which includes a Hailo 10H and 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM. With that, the Hailo 10H is capable of running LLMs entirely standalone, freeing the Pi's CPU and system RAM for other tasks. The chip runs at a maximum of 3W, with 40 TOPS of INT8 NPU inference performance in…
102
Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM
My micro site, zero.btxx.org , is being served to the public internet from a Raspberry Pi Zero v1.3 running Alpine Linux.
103
Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
Now that we’ve covered the contenders for this test, I will cover how this test will be performed and go through the results. It was a long time for me, but for you, it’ll just be a few…
104
Hosting a website on an 8-bit microcontroller
My victim is the AVR64DD32 which is quite similar to the Atmega328 of Arduino fame. Compared to the older Atmega, these AVR DD lines are cheaper for the same memory, use a single programming pin and have nicer peripherals:
105
The quiet resurgence of RF engineering
I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it wa...
106
Designing an Ethernet Switch ASIC
Designing the world's first open source Ethernet switch ASIC. An unmanaged cut-through 3-port 100Mbps switch fabbed on Global Foundries 180 nm.
107
Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
I spent years building one of the most popular LED strip visualizers on GitHub. It's the kind of project that's easy to get started but diabolically hard to master.
108
How SpaceX streamlined the Raptor engine
If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you’ve seen this famous image of three iterations of SpaceX’s Raptor rocket engine.
109
Intel Starts Shipping High-NA EUV Silicon
Coming to a Panther Lake notebook near you!
110
Dumping Lego NXT firmware off of an existing brick (2025)
Catgirls can have little a RCE, as a treat
111
Parametric CAD in Rust
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
112
How does GPS work?
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
113
Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine
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…
114
HDD Firmware Hacking
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.
115
Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter
Dmitry.GR: Fisher-Price Pixter: From unknown and obscure to fully documented, emulated, and preserved
116
Write up of my homebrew CPU build
The blog of an engineer from Canada
117
News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development
On Thursday, three of the lead Raspberry Pi engineers hosted an AMA on the r/engineering subreddit. Raspberry Pi 6 One of the most interesting tidbits was on the Pi 6. Looking back at previous launches: 2012: Raspberry Pi 2015: Raspberry Pi 2 (+3 years) 2016: Raspberry Pi 3 (+1 year) 2019: Raspberry Pi 4 (+3 years)…
118
Teardown: A Generic 7-Port USB 3.0 Hub That Wasn't
The recent end-of-financial-year sales were rather interesting – I found myself spending a lot more time browsing AliExpress than I did Amazon or eBay this year which is something I wouldn…
119
Rust (and Slint) on a Jailbroken Kindle
I recently jailbroke my 7th generation Kindle Paperwhite. While my motivation probably should have been "breaking free from Amazon's clammy and tightening grip", the truth is I wanted a way to use it as a clock on my nightstand. I found this project and figured I could just make some adjustments to the code. And that…
120
Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?
A battery technology that’s getting a lot of attention is solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material.