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LensLeech: Touch a camera to control your devices
Christopher Getschmann
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 294 posts.
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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.
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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 ...
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Listening to Satellites: A Journey with My RTL-SDR V3
How I received the signal of MANY satellites with an RTL-SDR V3
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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 ...
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The Beauty of Pulse Arc Welding
Sterling welding with the Lampert PUK04 pulse arc welder.
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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...
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How flip-flops are implemented in the Intel 8086 processor
A key concept for a processor is the management of "state", information that persists over time. Much of a computer is built from logic gate...
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Introduction to FPGAs
Introduction Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are a form of programmable hardware that has become inexpensive and accessible recently. I recently purchased a Digilent Basys 3 FPGA development…
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Review: A Dive into Mikrotik's Weird SmartNIC (2022)
an addendum has been posted, read it here 2023/12/02 - Hello, Hacker News! Check out these pictures of my cat: https://emma.pet Back in February, Mikrotik announced the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe, a peculiar 25gbps NIC. They’ve thrown an entire router into a PCIe NIC. But why? Wait, why? Mikrotik’s product listing has…
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Reverse engineering the Intel 386 processor's register cell
The groundbreaking Intel 386 processor (1985) was the first 32-bit processor in the x86 line. It has numerous internal registers: general-pu...
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AMD ROCm: A Wasted Opportunity
This post will mainly focus on ROCm HIP wasted opportunities for adoption. I wrote an overview of ROCm earlier at https://threedots.ovh/blog/2021/11/what-is-amd-rocm/ . This post will specifically eschew talking about issues about the API renames in ROCm HIP – breaking source compatibility with CUDA quite needlessly.
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Reverse-engineering the conditional jump circuitry in the 8086 processor
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978 and it had a huge influence on computing. I'm reverse-engineering the 8086 by examining t...
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Pico Cray – Small scale distributed computing
The Pico Cray is a cluster of 8 Picos and a controller Pico. All Picos are connected in parallel by an I2C bus. The controller is designated by one GPIO being held low, the processor Pico’s addresses are allocated automatically. The Controller Pico has a 320x240px display connected by SPI and a couple of buttons. ……
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Hacking the Book8088 for better accuracy
The Book8088 is an interesting little machine. It is essentially a 1980's computer in a laptop form factor. With apologies to Sergey Kiselev...
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The next Raptor OpenPOWER systems are coming, but they won't be Power10
I'd like to first start out by saying I've been aware of new developments but made certain promises to keep my mouth shut until all the pa...
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IBM Blue Lightning: World’s Fastest 386? (2014)
One of the OS/2 Museum’s vintage boards is a genuine Made in U.S.A. Alaris Cougar. These boards were produced by IBM for Alaris and are a bit unusual: There’s a small IBM DLC3 processor in plastic package soldered on board, and there’s also a Socket 2 which accepts regular 5-Volt 486DX/SX processors or a Pentium…
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Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components
Every trip to Defcon – the massive annual hacker-con in Las Vegas – is a delight. Partly it's the familiar – seeing old friends, getting updates on hacks of years gone by. But mostly, it's the surprises, the things you never anticipated. Defcon never fails to surprise.
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I chose the ThinkPad Z13 Gen1 as my Linux laptop
Blog, Podcasts, Live Streams and Videos about Linux and Open Source with a focus on Ubuntu, Debian and NixOS.
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How cheap digital verniers work (2017)
Ever wondered how cheap digital verniers are able to produce good precision at very low prices? I did, so I took one apart.
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All GB/s without FLOPS – Nvidia CMP 170HX Review
This article contains a basic Nvidia CMP 170HX performance overview, a performance lockdown workaround, a hardware teardown, a watercooling installation guide, and a repair log.
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Motorola's pioneering 8-bit 6800: Origins and architecture
Part 1 of the story of Motorola's 8-bit microprocessor design
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DIY Adapter: Using an e-bike battery to run a laptop
The goal here is to grab power from external battery packs of varying voltages and supply power to 'desktop replacement' sized laptops. This same topology can be used for Dell barrel jack systems.
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Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet
I built a device that allows a pinball machine from 1984 to automatically upload scores to the internet. The device taps into the machine’s memory bus and monitors the game state, uploading scores after each game.
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ThinkPad as a Server: The Follow-Up
The ThinkPad as a server is back, this time with a couple of adjustments.
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The killer features of the Steam Deck
In the beginning of the year I gave myself a late Christmas gift and bought a Steam Deck for myself. There were two main reasons I decided to buy it:
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