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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 296 posts.
Buy an RTX 5090, the fastest consumer GPU money can buy, and you get 104.8 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. Ask it to do double-precision math and you get 1.64 TFLOPS. That 64:1 gap is not a technology limitation. For fifteen years, the FP64:FP32 ratio has been slowly getting wider on consumer GPUs, widening the divide between…
According to the Apple support document How to identify the DFU port on Mac , the DFU (device firmware update) port location for MacBook Pro models with Apple silicon is as follows:
My blog about my project cars and other contraptions
Chronicles of a bad idea. Or how I designed a systolic array with in-silicon debug infrastructure from scratch in under two weeks, and taped it out on Global Foundry 180 nm though a Tiny Tapeout experimental shuttle.
The challenges around porting Linux to an old videogame console by Atari
Siri isn’t state of the art, but as long as it works — and it appears it does — it’s good enough for the consumer market.
The killer app for the 486 didn't come out until a year or so later
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.
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.
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…
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window.
As it turns out, the Brother NC-8700w Command Console is more interesting than it first appears.
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 […]
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.
two school nights, a pile of bootloops and one homemade rom later, my mother's phone is still e-waste. just faster
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!
36 mechanical keyboards. Click. Type. Listen. From IBM Model M (1985) to modern thocky customs.
When I was researching the mess related to strange and poorly documented CPUID bits in the Athlon MP and XP processors , I had to swap a lot of CPUs. This was uneventful in most cases… but only most.
This computer was so good and so far out there, we didn't know what we had.
I was very excited to get the latest version of my PCB from the manufacturer.
Apparently, one of my hobbies is making updates to my ergonomic setup, then blogging about it from an Amtrak train. I've gone and done it again.
An introduction to my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad addiction Over 10 years ago I got my first ThinkPad x60. I got interested in free software by reading the about GNU …
BIO is the I/O co-processor in the Baochip-1x, a mostly open source 22nm SoC I helped design. You can read more about the Baochip-1x’s background here , or pick up an evaluation board at Crowd Supply .
Maybe the code shouldn't be the only documentation?
Engineering contraptions
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
Last time I wrote about profiling in Zig on Apple Silicon, I touched on PMU counter profiling. This time I decided to go further and create my own tool to fetch all available counters for Apple Silicon processors (M1, M2, and later). Brief explanation of PMU counters PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) counters are…
If hyperscalers and chip companies don’t build up a TSMC competitor they are set to forego billions of dollars in revenue and stunt the AI revolution.
I found my old reMarkable 2 paper tablet, bought in 2021, it had sat unused for ~4 years or so. The device was in a sorry state:
