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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 242 posts.
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Pinebook Pro – First Impressions and Setup Tips
The Pinebook Pro is a 14" laptop built for developers and Linux end-users. It weighs less than 3lbs, which, in my case, replaces a two times heavier
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Guessing smart phone PINs by monitoring the accelerometer
“Practicality of Accelerometer Side Channels on Smartphones,” by Adam J. Aviv. Benjamin Sapp, Matt Blaze, and Jonathan M. Smith. Abstract: Modern smartphones are equipped with a plethora of sensors that enable a wide range of interactions, but some of these sensors can be employed as a side channel to surreptitiously…
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Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone
Huzzah! I recently received my Librem 5 (Evergreen) from Purism . The Librem 5 is a smartphone that runs an otherwise standard linux kernel. However, unlike Android which also relies on the linux kernel under the hood, the Librem 5 uses a GNU userspace, adapted for mobile. This makes it more akin to your typical…
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Arduino FIDO2 Authenticator
Introducing URU Card: an open-source, wallet-sized FIDO2 BLE authenticator based on ESP32, ATECC508A, OLED screen, and MPR121 touch keyboard. Join the project and start building your own secure authenticator.
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Clocking a 6502 simulator to 15GHz
6-5-0-who? The 6502 is an iconic processor that dominated home computing in the late 70s and early to mid 80s. It was used in machines ra...
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Hacking together a USB-C charger for a cheap Chromebook
The era of USB-C has come. The other day I threw all other cables into a box, and bought a set of USB-C to USB-C, Lightning, and microUSB cables. USB-C chargers around the house, USB-C PD power bank, even a nice small USB-C dock that works with the Nintendo Switch if the charger can do the right voltage. It's glorious.
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The Failure of the iPad
Two days ago, ZDNet published this article: Meet the iPad, your work computer: These 10 apps make real productivity possible . These kinds of articles, where writers explain how they use their iPads productively, musicians talk about how the iPad is truly a professional tool, or painters show how they use the iPad for…
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DIY Smart Doorbell with a Raspberry Pi
A DIY smart doorbell with a built-in camera, microphone, and speaker. This steampunk-themed design integrates with home assistant and our multi-room audio
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Reverse Engineering the PLA Chip in the Commodore 128
As I mentioned in my last post I’ve been working on reverse engineering the PLA chip in the C128. I’m now mostly done with this process so I think it’s time to share some of the findings.
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Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
Adventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.
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I Replaced My MacBook Pro with a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB for a Day
Earlier this week, as part of my work doing a more complete review of the Raspberry Pi 4 (coming soon!), I decided I'd go all-in and spend one entire day working entirely (or at least as much as possible) from a Raspberry Pi. And not just doing some remote coding sessions or writing a blog post—that's easy to do on a…
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Reverse engineering a forgotten 1970s Intel dual core beast: 8271, a new ISA
" As I recall, those two chips were fairly large. And fairly late -- to the marketplace. We had lots of issues with them. [...] Sometimes th...
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Inside a Titan missile guidance computer
I've been studying the guidance computer from a Titan II nuclear missile. This compact computer was used in the 1970s to guide a Titan II ...
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How to Improve Bluetooth Audio Quality on Linux
Bluetooth Audio on Linux is a bit of a mess. There's a fair bit you can do to significantly improve the quality though.
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25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer
Discover the 25-Hour Digital Myst Clock, merging D'ni and conventional timekeeping for Myst fans, with a display of proper D'ni digits.
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iPhone 12 Pro Camera Review
Testing the new iPhone 12 Pro in (and over) Glacier National Park.
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The Elroy Lamp: A transparent LCD lamp (2019)
Elroy is a table lamp with a unique feature -- the shade can dynamically change to a new style or pattern from your phone or web browser.
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MMU gang wars: the TLB drive-by shootdown
T The problem Every once in a while I get involuntarily dragged into heat...
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Apple's long processor journey
There have been multiple generations of Macs. Apple has not really divided them up. 1. Original 680x0 Macs with 24-bit ROMs (ending with the SE/30, Mac II, IIx IIcx) 2. 32-bit-clean-ROM 680x0 Macs (starting with the Mac IIci) 3. NuBus-based PowerMacs (6100, 7100, 8100) 4. OldWorld-ROM…
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Programming with RISC-V Vector Instructions
Perhaps the most interesting part of the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) is the vector extension (RISC-V "V"). In contrast to the average single-instruction multipe-data (SIMD) instruction set, RISC-V vector instructions are vector length agnostic (VLA). Thus, a RISC-V "V" CPU is flexible in choosing a…
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An History of Nvidia Stream Multiprocessor
I spent last week-end getting accustomed to CUDA and SIMT programming. It was a prolific time ending up with a Business Card Raytracer running close to 700x faster [1] , from 101s to 150ms. This pleasant experience was a good pretext to spend more time on the topic and learn about the evolution of Nvidia architecture…
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The Genius of RISC-V Microprocessors
How the instruction set for RISC-V processors has been designed cleverly for both simplicity and high performance.
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The Whitworth Three Plates Method (2017)
A visual step-by-step guide to Joseph Whitworth’s three-plate method for creating very flat reference surfaces.
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Tihle: A new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators
Today I’m publishing tihle, a new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators (currently only the 83+, but maybe others later). There’s rather a lot to say about it, but here I will discuss the motivation for a new emulator and the state of the art followed by technical notes on the design and initial development…
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How x86_64 Addresses Memory
Update 2025-03-05 : @jxu has shared a collection of simplified examples that are even easier to follow than the original ones in this post.