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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
When benchmarking software, we often start by measuring the time elapsed. If you are benchmarking data bandwidth or latency, it is the right measure. However, if you are benchmarking computational tasks where you avoid disk and network accesses and where you only access a few pages of memory, then the time elapsed is…
Muh freedumbs on muh hardware!
Welcome to Exploring FPGA Graphics. In this series, we learn about graphics at the hardware level and get a feel for the power of FPGAs. We’ll learn how screens work, play Pong, create starfields and sprites, paint Michelangelo’s David, draw lines and triangles, and animate characters and shapes. Along the way, you’ll…
I got curious about an ExpressCard to NVMe M.2 NGFF adapter I saw on Reddit, so I got one to try out myself, ending up with a total of 4 SSD-s on my ThinkPad T430. Yes, four.
The challenges around porting Linux to an old videogame console by Atari
Close to three years ago I wrote about using Oddly Specific Objects' alternate "motherboard" to modify a classic Casio F-91W watch: Pimping...
The Soviet space program used completely different controls and instruments from American spacecraft. One of the most interesting navigati...
Google's latest and hottest gadget needs little introduction. Since its public unveiling in April 2012, the tiny head-mounted Android computer has been collecting controversy and sociological analysis . It is currently available in limited beta to eminent members of the tech community and to a selection of "Glass…
Ever since hearing about Rob Miles' Bitshift Variations in C Minor , a 4-voice polyphonic 16 minute piece of algorithmically generated music, I wanted to implement it in hardware. Getting it onto just any microcontroller seemed too easy , so I wanted it to run on the smallest µC I could find — the ATtiny4. A while…
It's been quite awhile since I debugged a computer program. Too long. Although I miss coding, the thing I miss more is the process of findin...
The Apple Vision Pro is missing some important apps, and it seems likely that Apple’s App Store policies played a part. Might the company respond by doubling down with Disney?
Faster, cheaper, and now with a truly great keyboard.
This article discusses different types of rocket engine cycles, from pressure-fed through gas generator, to full-flow staged combustion.
I wanted to get a music streaming server running as I have in the past but with the scarcity of RasberryPi’s my I needed to try something new. I had a Samsung Galaxy S7 that had been taking up space in my junk drawer and this post is my journey to give it a new task.
Update: Precision 7520 and 7720 available as of March 28; Dell Precision 5720, a 27” All-in-One available as of April 18. Today I am excited to announce the next generation of our Ubuntu-based Pre…
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a $12 “Gongkai” cell phone (pictured above) that I stumbled across in the markets of Shenzhen, China. My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping…
I recently purchased a book for my MSC which was only available via a crappy Android app. There was no obvious way to decrypt it to read on a more sensible device, so I resorted to the ancient art of screenscraping. This is a quick-and-dirty way to grab images of the pages and convert them to a standard PDF using…
Let's reverse engineer a restaurant pager system I bought off the internet!
Trying to determine exactly where asynchronous interrupts are delivered on Intel CPUs.
Despite otherwise seeming to work correctly, I can't monitor a Back-UPS BX1600MI in Linux without seeing a constant stream of spurious battery detach/reattach and power fail/restore events that last less than 2 seconds each. I've tried multiple computers and multiple UPSes of that model. It doesn't happen in their own…
Siri isn’t state of the art, but as long as it works — and it appears it does — it’s good enough for the consumer market.
I've an unhealthy amount of smart gadgets at home. Enough so that it's worth running an orientation session when friends come to visit. This is what the Alexa does, here's which light switches not to use, don't be scared if the Roomba attacks. That sort of thing. I don't know how long we'll live in this place. It's…
The killer app for the 486 didn't come out until a year or so later
