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An Introduction to CubeSats
An introduction that answers the questions what are cubesats, why they are so popular, what are their main subststems, and how does thier future look?
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 165 posts.
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Powering a Mainframe
The last few days have been eventful. I was contacted by the datacenter that the mainframe's cage is now ready for moving in, and the power ...
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Vintage video game cartridges with built-in modems
A lot of contemporary video game players take online communications for granted—after all, online services have been a standard feature in consoles for nearly fifteen years at this point1. However, before the ubiquity of the internet there was a time when some clever cartridges let gamers run up to the...
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Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison
Note: I also posted a separate review of some A2 'Application Performance' class cards, see this post: A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi. As a part-time tinkerer and full-time developer, I have been fascinated by single board computers (SBCs) since the first Raspberry Pi was…
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Lisp Badge – Self-contained ATmega1284 Lisp computer
This is a self-contained computer with its own display and keyboard, based on an ATmega1284, that you can program in the high-level language Lisp:
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A computer built from NOR gates: inside the Apollo Guidance Computer
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer 1 , the computer that provided guidance, navigation, and control onboard the Apollo flight...
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Visualizing Commodore 1541 Disk Contents
G64 files are C64/1541 disk images that contain all bits as they are physically laid out on the 5¼-inch floppy disk. Let’s visualize them! This animation shows 28 regular Commodore 1541 disks. Track 1 contains 21 sectors. Every sector is prefixed by two small red areas: These are the SYNC marks.…
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Build an Ioniser in Under $10
A Do it Yourself project to help remove dust particles in your room. A completely open-source hardware project which you can download and use for free.
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Lego logic gates and mechanical computing
randomwraith.com - LEGO, Beer & pastimes
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A FrankenPad Story: T25 with Quad-Core CPU and UHD LCD Panel
I like T25. Although, it wasn’t the ThinkPad of a dream, and its placement as a retro ThinkPad sounds ridiculous and frustratingly, for me it was the best modern ThinkPad...
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Rust, a Raspberry Pi and Addressable LEDs
Tom Arrell's blog. Tom is a Software Engineer who writes about programming, embedded and electrical projects, and life.
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ARM and Intel have different performance characteristics: a case study
In my previous post, I reviewed a new fast random number generator called wyhash. I commented that I expected it to do well on x64 processors (Intel and AMD), but not so well on ARM processors. Let us review again wyhash: uint64_t wyhash64_x; uint64_t wyhash64() { wyhash64_x += 0x60bee2bee120fc15; __uint128_t tmp; tmp…
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The Sad End of Intel Desktop Boards
As previously discussed on this blog, Intel decided to quit the desktop board business in 2013. What has not been discussed is how Intel treated the buyers of the last generation (i.e. 8-series Lynx Point chipsets) of those boards. Since I have now acquired two of those boards, DZ87KLT-75K and DQ87PG, I had an…
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IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display
What explains the popularity of terminals with 80×24 and 80×25 displays? A recent blog post " 80x25 " motivated me to investigate this. The ...
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Put 1.7MB onto 1.44MB Floppies (1999)
How to create 1.7-Mbyte MDF floppies with GRDuw Windows shareware or Linux. Now add DNS server and full DHCP to floppy-bootable Linux.
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Reverse-engineering precision op amps from a 1969 analog computer
We are restoring a vintage 1 computer that CuriousMarc recently obtained. Analog computers were formerly popular for fast scientific compu...
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Capturing PAL video with an SDR, and a few dead ends
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
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A completely rebuilt, digitally-enabled Polaroid SX-70 camera
A completely rebuilt digital Polaroid SX-70 camera
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SweRV – An Annotated Deep Dive of the SweRV RISC-V Core
Every 6 months, the RISC-V consortium organizes a two day workshop where various companies and research entities present work that is one way or the other related to RISC-V.
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Why Ice Lake is Important – a bit-basher’s perspective
With Computex, there’s been a ton of news about Ice Lake (hereafter ICL) and the Sunny Cove core (SNC). Wikichip, Extremetech and Anandtech among many others have coverage (and there will be …
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The mystery of my desktop that locks up when it gets too cold
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Fixed Layout Prototyping – Hexagonal Electronics Breadboard
daverowntree has one repository available. Follow their code on GitHub.
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A look at IBM S/360 core memory: In the 1960s, 128 kilobytes weighed 610 pounds
I recently received a vintage core memory array, part of an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. These arrays were used in a 128-kilobyte core...