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Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
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Wireless Is a Trap
Over and over again, I’ve seen people fix some wireless-related problem and go “wow, I had no idea how much better this could be!" • Wireless protocols often silently operate in an extremely degraded state that makes them substantially worse than wired equivalents.
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Inside a low-budget consumer hardware espionage implant
The following analysis was performed on a S8 data line locator which replied to the hidden SMS command for version query ( *3646655* ) with:
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Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages
How we bypassed Apple's regulatory restrictions, built a Faraday cage and enabled georestricted features on the Airpods Pro 2 for our grandparents.
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Computer latency: 1977-2017
I've had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices…
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The ReMarkable Streaming Tool v2: Elevating Remote Work Efficiency
In this article, I expose the new version of the streaming tool for my reMarkable tablet. Originally crafted in 2021, this tool allowed me to stream sketches during video calls. Aiming for more user-friendliness, I revamped the design to a clientless implementation. This articles describes the implementation with some…
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How does a screen work?
From electron guns to tiny electric crystals - digital displays have always been the unsung hero of computing.
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Making My Own USB Keyboard from Scratch
A few months ago, I completed a project to build an entire USB keyboard from scratch. This included electronic circuit design, PCB design, firmware coding, CAD design, assembly and usage. The final result is my daily driver work keyboard, which I affectionately call “KeeBee”:
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Why three prongs?
Why do AC cords need three prongs? If there is no positive or negative in AC systems, why do we have HOT and NEUTRAL? I attempt to shed light on some of these mysteries.
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A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine
This project, the M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine, was on my to-do list for a long time. I finally managed to complete the project after working on it for several months in my free time. The machine uses an Arduino microcontroller, stepper motors, an RGB colour sensor and 3D-printed parts to sort several types of…
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No I don't want to turn on Windows Backup with One Drive
Microsoft is doing everything in its power to alienate users. When it's not enshittification, it's user hostility. You can't even dismiss forced reminders.
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Running local models on an M4 with 24GB memory
Experiments with getting usable outputs out of local models on a standard Macbook
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Using a "proper" camera as a webcam
It’s 2022, so many of us now have 2 years experience of online meetings. My experience is that the better that I can see and hear someone in an online call, the more natural the conversation feels. Put another way, I think one does a courtesy to the other person by improving the quality of how you appear in a video…
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Crazy Thin ‘Deep Insert’ ATM Skimmers
A number of financial institutions in and around New York City are dealing with a rash of super-thin “deep insert” skimming devices designed to fit inside the mouth of an ATM’s card acceptance slot. The card skimmers are paired with tiny pinhole cameras that are cleverly disguised as part of the cash machine. Here’s a…
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II
Less than a month ago, I began investigating the Apple M1 GPU in hopes of developing a free and open-source driver. This week, I’ve reached a second milestone: drawing a triangle with my own open-source code. The vertex and fragment shaders are handwritten in machine code, and I interface with the hardware via the…
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IKEA Frekvens LED box hack
Ikea is an interesting store. Even if you go in having in mind you're only going to buy that one thing that you actually need and this time you're not going to be distracted by other crap, you tend to come out with about three times the amount of things you wanted to buy. For us hackers, especially Ikea-fare equipped…
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Linux/4004: booting Linux on Intel 4004 for fun, art, and no profit
Dmitry.GR: Slowly booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit
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What's the strongest AI model you can train on a laptop in five minutes?
What’s the strongest model I can train on my MacBook Pro in five minutes? I’ll give the answer upfront: the best 5-minute model I could train was a ~1.8M-param…
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Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended
The Game Boy Pocket SP
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Intel Problems
Intel is in much more danger than its profits suggest; the problems are a long time in the making, and the solution is to split up the company.
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Intel's Humbling
Intel under Pat Gelsinger is reaping the disaster that came from a lack of investment and execution a decade ago; the company, though, appears to be headed in the right direction, as evidenced by i…
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Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)
So my journey with these earbuds started after I saw them on this Mrwhosetheboss video about pointless tech. This device seems to be also popular on TikTok. My suspicions were confirmed, this runs android. So of course i went ahead and bought them. 245 euros later... and they finally arrived!
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M4 Mac mini's efficiency
I had to pause some of my work getting a current-gen AMD graphics card running on the Pi 5 and testing a 192-core AmpereOne server to quickly post on the M4's efficiency. I expected M4 to be better than M1/M2 (I haven't personally tested M3), and I hoped it would at least match the previous total-system-power…
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The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
When was the last time you needed to buy a new PC? Two years ago? Three years ago? The last PC I built was in 2009. I had to upgrade because I pushed the previous one I built to the limit and that was
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The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan
December 2020 Update: Lo and behold, the Pi Foundation tacitly acknowledges the Pi needs a fan in the official case, because now they sell the Case Fan! The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pi 4 announcement blog post touted the Pi 4 as providing "PC-like level of performance for most users". The Foundation even offers a…