1441
Fixing the MacBook Pro
Despite my love for the previous Retina MacBook Pro , I won’t be able to use it forever. The best laptop to ever exist should be in the future, not the past.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
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Pinephone first steps
After anki trashed my history, uploaded the trashed history to the sync server, and then repeatedly re-synced the trashed history every time I tried to restore from backup, I wrote my own spaced repetition app. It reads input from a markdown file, asks questions in the terminal and stores state in a json file. I wrote…
1444
Listening to satellites for $30
I've ever dreamed of space & satellites, it turms out you can received pictures from them.
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Sony PlayStation 2 fixing frenzy
Sony PlayStation 2 fixing frenzy - retrohax.net I once wrote a blog post about Nintendo Wii controllers. That post was already based on ...
1447
Building my own HomeKit Thermostat
Built a custom HomeKit enabled thermostat, because I was fed up with the walled gardens of Nest
1448
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W die shots
Teardown and analysis of electronics. Integrated circuit design analysis.
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Analyzing the Monoprice Blackbird HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Down Converter
I got my hands on a Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Converter . According to the marketing copy it “is the definitive solution for playback of new 4K HDCP 2.2 encoded content on 4K displays with the old HDCP 1.4 standard.”
1451
Making a rickroll laser: A parametric speaker
Most speakers emit sound in all directions because they are relatively small compared to the wavelength. Audible sounds have wavelengths of up to several meters, so an acoustically "large" speaker might not even fit in your house.
1452
Recreating Voodoo Graphics and a Late-1990s Gaming PC on an FPGA
I've spent the last month adding features and improving performance in z486_MiSTer , mostly working through games from the first half of the 1990s. Looking a few years ahead brought me to another change I wanted to explore: the arrival of 3D graphics cards.
1453
It took me nine years to hack my Xbox 360
I purchased a Matrix CoolRunner Rev D back in 2017. This little chip is called a glitcher and it’s a type of modchip. Its sole purpose, the reason it was designed, is to deliver a short pulse of energy (~ 100 nanoseconds) to an Xbox 360 Console.
1454
Nintendo DS code editor and scriptable game engine
I built a scriptable 3D game engine for the Nintendo DS so you can write and run games directly on the console itself. Written in C using libnds , it compiles to a 100KB .nds ROM that runs at 60 FPS . Features a touch-based code editor on the bottom screen and real-time 3D rendering on the top screen. Ships with a…
1455
The transparent chip inside a vintage Hewlett-Packard floppy drive
While repairing an eight-inch HP floppy drive, we found that the problem was a broken interface chip. Since the chip was bad, I decapped it ...
1456
Reverse Engineer the BL602 WiFi Driver
What happens inside the WiFi Driver on RISC-V BL602... And how we found the incomplete source code for the driver
1457
Peloton cuts back on Apple Watch support
With one of Peloton's latest updates, they have cut back the ability to connect the Apple Watch with the Bike+ Bootcamp Classes (in addition to it being already disabled for for Strength and Yoga Classes)
1458
TPM GPIO fail: How bad OEM firmware ruins Intel TPM security
In this article I demonstrate a software only attack that allows an operating system to set the PCRs of a discrete TPM device to arbitrary values and unseal any secret that uses a PCR based sealing policy (such as disk encryption keys used by unattended unlock TPM FDE schemes).
1459
Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem
NVIDIA sent me a preview unit of their new DGX Spark desktop “AI supercomputer”. I’ve never had hardware to review before! You can consider this my first ever sponsored post …
1460
A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi
Update: See follow-up post about A1 vs A2 performance, Raspberry Pi microSD follow-up, SD Association fools me twice?. After I published my 2019 Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison, I received a lot of feedback about newer 'A2' Application Performance class microSD cards, and how they could produce even…
1461
HFS+ Bit Rot
HFS+ is a terribly old filesystem with serious flaws. I sincerely hope that Apple comes with an update of the filesystem for WWDC 2015. After all they have been working on Swift for the past 4 years and we have just learned about it last week. HFS+ is seriously old HFS+ was released in 1998, in the era of Mac OS…
1462
This TRS-80
A first-hand story about the TRS-80 Model 100 and journalism
1463
TROS: IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers
I recently came across a Transformer Read-Only Storage (TROS) module that stored microcode in an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. This unu...
1464
ESP32-S3 has a few SIMD instructions
Intro Espressif Systems released their ESP32-S3 SoC a few years ago, but only recently have they released more documentation and support of ...
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Agilent 2000a / 3000a Oscilloscope NAND Recovery
As a resident member of the EEVblog Test Equipment Anonymous support group, I have picked up my fair share of old test equipment boat anchors, but my knees buckle at broken recently manufactured oscilloscopes in the sub $200 range. In this case, the Agilent / Keysight Infiniivision X-series oscilloscopes have been an…
1467
Reverse engineering an ancient wireless security keypad using RTL-SDR
A few weeks ago, some friends and I decided that our houses weren’t crammed full enough with useless crap and so we embarked on a journey to a large junk shop surplus warehouse. The place was a vast hangar brimming with old and curious pieces of technology ranging from IBM keyboards to VHS video editing …
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A Small Look into the GameCube’s Copy Filter
A while back I was going through Dolphin’s issues page out of sheer boredom. I eventually came across issue 726 – Gamma setting has no effect. Out of curiosity, I clicked.
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We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
A number of 70s computing systems had nine-bit bytes, most prominently the PDP-10, but today 1 [ 1 Apparently, it was the System/360 that really set the standard here. ] all systems use 8-bit bytes and that now seems natural. 2 [ 2 Though you still see RFCs use "octet", and the C standard has a CHAR_BITS macro, to…
1470
What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier
Wirecutter is obsessed with the humidifier that untold numbers of purchasers despise