2011
Full Reverse Engineering of the TI-84 Plus Operating System
Evidence-indexed documentation of TI-84 Plus OS 2.55MP ROM behavior and hardware interfaces.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
2012
Ludde's FPGA NES
I was a bit bored during Christmas, so I decided to construct a whole Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in an FPGA . An FPGA is a progra...
2013
PokéWalker hacking: A complete device takeover and ROM dump using infrared
Dmitry.GR: Complete device takeover by blinking at it!
2014
2017 Camera News
Herewith some reportage on the most interesting cameras in the world, with opinions to provoke er entertain people who are up on this stuff, and a basic survey of the landscape for people who like pictures and wonder about cameras.
2015
Heat exchanger masks for cold weather cycling (2019)
(updated, March 2025) How I Started Caring About Heat Exchanger Masks Back in the 90s I started riding my bike to work after a hiatus of a few years. My coworkers would regularly ask me if I was go…
2016
Open Source Hardware Hearing Aid Part 1
My mother got hearing aids a few years ago. About a month later, she lost one. Insurance said if she wanted a replacement, she could pay them many thousands of dollars or she could wait a year.
2017
Rust on the RP2350 (2024)
Today sees the announcement of the latest additions to Raspberry Pi's microcontroller line-up - the RP2350 family. I've had prototype units for a while, and you can run Rust code on it today. To my knowledge this is the first ever microcontroller launch with Rust support out-of-the-box.
2018
A Beginner's Two-Component Crystal-Style Wi-Fi Detector
Crystal radios are famous for doing something almost magical: picking up broadcast signals with nothing more than a diode, an antenna, and a pair of headphones. They’re the simplest RF receivers yo…
2019
A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
This is a story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000, the first model of the Amiga series. Many of you might be familiar with the popular Amiga 500 or later models, but the Commodore Amiga 1000 was actually the first model of the Amiga series produced. I consider the A1000 a significant piece of home…
2020
The Intel 8086 processor's registers: from chip to transistors
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop and...
2021
VR robots are building railways in Japan
Could VR-powered humanoid robots be the future of heavy construction? Over the years we’ve seen a number of major corporations try their hands at marrying VR technology and robotics, from VR convenience store employees and a remote-controlled bomb squad bot to a rather unsettling headset that uses a robotic arm to…
2022
You can use lightguns on LCDs sometimes
Old-school cathode ray tube TVs have become de rigeur in the retro scene as the true way to experience retro games “the way they were designed”. But there’s ...
2023
How the SNES Graphics System Works
Last week's article discussed how the Super Nintendo's Video system feeds the TV's CRT. Today I'll summarize what I understand of the hardware generating these graphics.
2024
Patching my guitar amp's firmware
I’m having a lot of fun with reverse engineering lately, so when I was looking over the service manual for my guitar amp, a Yamaha THR10c, and saw references to a UART header in the schematic, I got excited. I wondered if anything cool was hiding in there. Next to it was a JTAG header. I knew next to nothing about…
2025
Dad’s Custom Atari Peripherals
This guest post is from Jim Trageser , a long-time Goto 10 reader.
2026
Listening to Satellites: A Journey with My RTL-SDR V3
How I received the signal of MANY satellites with an RTL-SDR V3
2027
Interesting double-poly latches inside AMD's vintage LANCE Ethernet chip
I've studied a lot of chips from the 1970s and 1980s, so I usually know what to expect. But an Ethernet chip from 1982 had something new: a ...
2028
Programming a CH32v003 with light
A comedic example, parked nicely on the thinnest wedge of the venn diagram, is the HamFurs – people who do amateur radio while wearing fur suits. While it isn't my cup of tea, I love that such a group exists. They seemed like nice people when I chatted to them.
2029
ECC and DDR5
Hamming Codes ECC RAM corrects errors that occur in memory before it gets to the CPU. The most common form of ECC is the Hamming Code [1] which when it has R redundant bits can correct single bit e…
2030
My New FreeBSD Laptop: Dell Latitude 7390
A few months ago, after my System76 Galago Pro had its second experience with a dead/swelling batery, I decided that it was time to replace it. On February 15th, I ordered a Dell Latitude 7390.
2031
Building a PC, Part IX: Downsizing
Hard to believe that I’ve had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that’s yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really boring. It took 5 years for me to muster up the
2032
Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen
On September 13th 2013 George Hahn wrote a popular blog post titled “Why the PhoneBloks phone will never happen”. Still to this day, PhoneBloks remains only a concept without any concrete plans to go to market.
2033
Simulating the IBM 360/50 mainframe from its microcode
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. System/360 was an extremely risky "bet-t...
2034
Librem 5 Evergreen vs. PinePhone (Part 2)
It’s been about half a year since I wrote my original post comparing the Librem 5 and Pinephone. The original post saw some controversy as well as quite a bit of attention on Hacker News . Surprisingly, for a market dominated by new tech every year, there remains quite a bit of interest in these two devices.
2035
The Beauty of Pulse Arc Welding
Sterling welding with the Lampert PUK04 pulse arc welder.
2036
PC Engine CPU
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.
2037
2038
Making glass-to-metal seals for homemade vacuum tubes
When making vacuum tubes, the glass is actually the easy part: premade tube stock of almost any size is easily available.
2039
Racintosh Plus – Rackmount Mac Plus
I own a Macintosh Plus from 1986, I found it in the mid 2000's on my college campus on a free-to-a-good-home shelf (Mad Marc's shelf in the chemistry building) in great shape and with its mouse, keyboard, and an HD-20 external hard disk drive. That silly computer has been on the journey with me ever since, leaving…
2040
The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (featuring PPC Toolbox)
Most of my systems are microcomputers (and commensurately sized), though I do have some moderately larger beasts: you've met homer , my 1987...