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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
Gerät 32620: the machine that powered numerous number stations
A few years ago, I first stumbled over some recordings of number stations and started reading up on their history. For most of them, we have pretty good guesses who ran them and for what purpose. One example is the Gongs and Chimes Station , known for its melody that got increasingly creepy over the years, the more…
Getting debug access on a Brother printer over Telnet
As it turns out, the Brother NC-8700w Command Console is more interesting than it first appears.
RP2040 Boot Sequence
This document has been assembled to supplement a set of instructions about writing one's own bootloader for the RP2040. Writing a bootloader requires some understanding of the boot sequence, but it became a bit too cumbersome to include that explanation in the bootloader documentation.
Rust on Espressif chips – 15-07-2022
Scott Mabin's blog
Motion sensing using the doppler effect
Recently I stumbled upon an interesting paper for implementing motion sensing requiring no special hardware, only a speaker and mic ! Unfortunately the paper didn't include code to test it, so I decided to reproduce it here on the web!
Intel's Immiseration
The long, seemingly inevitable decline of an icon
Alarms in medical equipment
ISO/IEC 60601-1-8, Patterson and other alarms in medical equipment Sample Alarm Sounds - Sirens, buzzers and other sounds
Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware
In one of my classes I asked the question I was afraid to ask but I just needed the answer to: “Who is afraid of not getting a job after graduating?” About eighty percent of the 150 people in the room raised their hands. That is roughly 120 students answering, in one motion, that they […]
Signal reflections in electronic circuits
What are "signal reflections", really? And do they matter in circuit design?
My phone replaced a brass plug
Porting a 2012 OpenCV paper to YOLOv8 and CoreML on iOS to score rifle shooting targets from a photo - replacing the brass-plug scoring gauge with on-device computer vision.
The Intel 8088 processor's instruction prefetch circuitry: a look inside
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor. IBM's decision to use the 8088 processor in the I...
Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040
A look into the hardware design of Starfish
18' Canoe from One Sheet of Plywood
The prospect of building a one sheet kayak, as presented in the original Prism section , has aroused some interest. The original "maximum volume" kayak Prism would not be suitable for a kayaking beginner, however, unless he or she was equipped with excellent balancing abilitites. This design is an attempt to overcome…
The laptop that won't die
My $200, 12-year-old Thinkpad has outlasted two high-end Macbooks
I couldn't wait for the new Mac Pro
For those of you coming from Hacker News wondering why I need OS X it’s because I’m an indie developer that makes this. I’m not sure if it was the after the 4th or 5th time my Macbook Air hard crashed rendering in Final Cut Pro that my planned upgrade timing would need to be brought forward. In any case, the writing…
My new PSU burns out – I fix it, and torture it by cracking water
My brand new PSU, themost complicated circuit I designed and built just recently, startedlife in October 2023. It seemed to work pretty well, at least I gott...
In love with the BBC micro:bit
I finally got my hands on the micro:bit , the BBC ’s new educational computer and spiritual successor to the legendary BBC Micro , and I’m absolutely in love with its potential as a platform for learning how to code.
RISC in 2022
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Porting Android 16 to my blind mother's keypad phone
two school nights, a pile of bootloops and one homemade rom later, my mother's phone is still e-waste. just faster
Programming ARM μC in Rust at four different levels of abstraction
This content was originally meant to be presented as part of my workshop on Rust and microcontrollers at the NITC FOSSMeet 2018 . As I was not able to cover it satisfactorily during the workshop, I thought of writing it down!
Making holograms with a pen plotter
I have a pen-plotter! It’s great. It’s like having a printer but slow and it breaks more often. I got it on eBay and it came sorta broken and I immediately spent the difference between what I paid and the price of new one fixing it. Now it’s fixed!
Making a Ponyo boat
If you've seen the film Ponyo (or if you grew up in Asia) you may have seen a sort of toy boat powered by a very simple steam engine. This...
I Love My PinePhone
An attempt to document my experiences and rationale for wanting to use a PinePhone, as well as my thoughts on mobile Linux in general.
Apple’s Newest OLED Supplier
BOE Technology
How Pulse Oximeters Work (2015)
Principles of how pulse oximetry works explained without using complicated physics.