1981
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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
1982
I built a special PCIe card to test GPUs on the Pi
I partnered up with Mirek (of Mirkotronics / @Mirko_DIY on Twitter) to build the Pi4GPU (or 'PiG' for short): This journey started almost three years ago: almost immediately after the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was launched, I started testing graphics cards on it. First I tried some low-spec cards like the Zotac…
1983
Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 4: What's running on the system
This post describes our continuing efforts to restore a Xerox Alto. We checked that the low-level microcode tasks are running correctly a...
1984
“Space age electronics”: Inside a GE thin-film paperweight from the 1960s
In the early 1960s, General Electric developed a technology called thin-film electronics. 1 These circuits were built from thin films of ...
1985
Inside the 76477 Space Invaders sound effect chip
The 76477 Complex Sound Generation chip (1978) provided sound effects for Space Invaders 1 and many other video games . It was also a pop...
1986
The mysterious heart of the Roland TR-808 drum machine
The strange story of a rejected batch of transistors at the heart of the world's most iconic drum machine - The Roland TR-808.
1987
Reverse Engineering the Constants in the Pentium FPU
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, establishing a long-running brand of high-performance processors. 1 The Pentium incl...
1988
An Interview with Zen Chief Architect Mike Clark
Zen is one of the most important microarchitectures in the history of the x86 ecosystem.
1989
DisplayPort and 4K
The Problem Video playback looks better with a higher scan rate. A lot of content that was designed for TV (EG almost all historical documentaries) is going to be 25Hz interlaced (UK and Australia)…
1990
Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers
Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers Scaife et al., USENIX Security 2018 Until I can get my hands on a Skim Reaper I’m not sure I’ll ever trust an ATM or other expo…
1991
Moore's law hits the roof
Software optimization resources | E-mail subscription to this blog | www.agner.org
1992
How to liberate a Chromebook
Google is about as open as a clam. Over the holidays, I found a Chromebook that Samsung had given me to evaluate about six years ago and which had been gathering dust ever since. Coincidentally, Laura’s sister Annie had just told me that she needed a laptop. Hmm… Well, there was no way I was going to give her a Google…
1993
PSA: If you're a fan of ATmega, try AVR Dx
A little-known offshoot of the ATmega series of 8-bit microcontrollers is better, faster, and cheaper than its progenitor.
1994
$99 Mineserver: The Devil Is in the Details
An update on my kids' Mineserver project
1995
1996
I made a macro keypad with 3D-printed switches
Latest on the 3d-printed keyboard switch project: I've reached a switch design that I think is probably reliable enough, and I've put 3 of them together to form a macro keypad just to see how it all goes together before I commit to a full keyboard. I don't have a number for how many presses the switch lasts, other…
1997
An unusual 7400-series chip implemented with a gate array
When I look inside a chip from the popular 7400 series, I know what to expect: a fairly simple die, implemented in a straightforward, cost-e...
1998
1999
Retina iMac owners can greatly improve graphics performance of many applications
Hmph! Not sure which one is "correct" there... hmm... If you use kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedFirst for the CGBitmapContext rather than kCGImageAlphaNoneFirst, then it looks closer to the original, maybe. ? Also other caveat: NSBitmapImageRep can't seem to deal with the ARGB format either, so if you use that you need to…
2000
Extracting ROM constants from the 8087 math coprocessor's die
Intel introduced the 8087 chip in 1980 to improve floating-point performance on the 8086 and 8088 processors, and it was used with the ori...
2001
LensLeech: Touch a camera to control your devices
Christopher Getschmann
2002
Decoding the NEC V20 Microcode
reenigne's decoding of the 8088 microcode in 2020 opened the doors for extremely accurate emulation of the 8088 CPU. Although I had added...
2003
The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines
Tunneling is an important technology for modern civilization, as a tunnel is often the only reasonable way to create a direct path between two points.
2004
2005
ZFS on a single core RISC-V hardware with 512MB
Is this feasible? Yes it is! OpenZFS on Linux compiled from sources for RISC-V, it will work with less than 250MB of RAM for a nearly fully filled 2TB zfs volume with 225.000 files! Even stressing the system and run in parallel (via Wifi): a…
2006
DIY microscope lenses on BMD pocket 6K camera
I was having fun lately with some normal macro photography and was curious if I somehow can use my fathers microscope lenses on my photo and film cameras. The idea is not new, a quick google search showed that it was indeed possible but you need a special adapter for these microscope lenses. The adapter is called “RMS…
2007
Can My Water Cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster Beat My MacBook?
It's time to put my water cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster to the test. I put it up against my MacBook and a Windows PC to see which performed best
2008
Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data
In the previous Xerox Alto restoration session , we got the disk working, but the system didn't boot. After much investigation, I discove...
2009
Bit-Banging Bluetooth Low Energy
Dmitry.GR: Creating BTLE-compliant advertisement packets, so that iOS and android devices can see and parse them.
2010
Explanation of 44.1 kHz CD sampling rate
The CD sampling rate has to be larger than about 40 kHz to fulfill the Nyquist criterion that requires sampling at twice the maximum analog frequency, which is about 20 kHz for audio. The sampling frequency is chosen somewhat higher than the Nyquist rate since practical filters neede to prevent aliasing have a finite…