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Pi Pico 2 Extreme Teardown
Teardown and analysis of electronics. Integrated circuit design analysis.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 313 posts.
182
Moving to a RTOS on the RP2040
As projects get more complicated the tooling has to improve. Outgrowing the arduino-ide is easy on the Pi Pico with the excelent pico-sdk but what if things get even more complicated...
183
Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+
Sniffing USB HID traffic from the Stream Deck Plus to map its dial encoder and touchscreen events, building on the original Stream Deck reverse engineering.
184
Zen, CUDA, and Tensor Cores, Part I: The Silicon
Given the complexity of today's computing hardware, it’s easy to get confused about what is meant by the word “core”.
185
The Apple Jonathan: A 1980s concept computer that never shipped
In the middle of the 1980s, Apple found itself with several options regarding the future of its computing platforms. The Apple II was the company’s bread and butter. The Apple III was pitched as an evolution of that platform, but was clearly doomed due to hardware and software issues. The Lisa was expensive and not…
186
The M2 is more advanced than it seemed
Apple’s M2 chip uses a newer version of the CPU core instruction set. This increases its capability, thus how well it will cope with future apps and macOS, compared with the M1.
187
Yes, you can play Duck Hunt without a television (but I can't)
Duck Hunt is considered a classic of the Nintendo Entertainment System. But surprisingly, the concept of hunting ducks did not originate in 1984– people have...
188
Error Handling in Baby Toys
Electrical baby toys are interesting to disassemble and look at how it’s made. Not up to the …
189
Microwave spontaneously turned on by its LED display
My microwave oven started to malfunction at around five years old. It started to randomly power on the lamp, fan, and turntable. It progressively got worse over several weeks until it was mostly stuck on. The microwave oven is not usable when this happens: It behaves as if the door were open, causing the control panel…
190
Back to the future: Are hackers the future of amateur radio?
Last fall, under the aegis of Ham Radio Village , I was awarded a grant to take my one-day Tech class on the road. Ham Radio Village believes that more people in technical fields should have amateur radio licenses and that amateur radio is underrepresented in the hacker, STEM/STEAM, and maker communities. Currently…
191
Apple II graphics: More than you wanted to know
The Apple ][ is one of the most iconic vintage computers of all time. But since Wozniak’s monster lasted all the way until 1993 (1995 if you could the IIe ca...
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Earth rotation limits in-body image stabilization to 6.3 stops (2020)
In 2016, Olympus Camera made some buzz in the photo world when they claimed that their new camera was capable of an impressive 6.5 stops of stabilization and that the limiting factor was in fact th…
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Glucoboy
Emulating the unknown: Blood testing device for the GBA
194
Tiny Undervalued Hardware Companions
After playing/working with computers for more then 25 years I started to appreciate small but handy valuable stuff – like adapters or handlers or … yeah – all kind of stuff. With …
195
Upgrading a Toshiba NAS HDD Firmware on Linux
I reversed the firmware updater of my Toshiba HDD to be able to update it on Linux. The following commands should work, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK :
196
VPR: Nordic's First RISC-V Processor
VPR (pronounced “Viper”) is Nordic Semiconductor’s first RISC-V processor, landing in the new nRF54H and nRF54L lines of SoCs after their initial announcements in April and October of 2023 respectively. Readers of this blog are familiar with my long-running obsession interest in RISC-V (see my RISC-V Tips and RISC-V…
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The Nvidia Way
Tae Kim's terrific new book on the story of Nvidia and Jensen Huang
199
Formlabs Form 4 Teardown
Formlabs has recently launched the fourth edition of their flagship SLA printer line, the Form 4 . Of course, I jumped on the chance to do a teardown of the printer; I’m grateful that I was able to do the same for the Form 1 , Form 2 , and Form 3 generations. In addition to learning a lot from the process of tearing…
200
Creating an autopilot in X-Plane using Python
Introduction Today’s post will take us in a slightly different direction than the last few. Today’s post will be about hooking up some Python code to the X-Plane flight simulator to enable development of an autopilot using PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controllers. I’ve been a fan of flight simulators for…
201
How to improve the RISC-V specification
My main project is to create an executable spec of the Intel Architecture but, every now and then, I get to take a broader look at ISA specifications and think about the strengths and weaknesses of other ISA specs: what makes them work well; and what techniques they could borrow from other specifications. Earlier this…
202
To Nerves from Elixir
I adore Nerves. I recently joined the core team. And I'll be doing my best to help people get along with this lovely way to co-mingle hardware and massively concurrent reliable software.
203
Thoughts on Vision Pro
A month ago, I flew from London to NYC, paid $3500 for a Vision Pro headset at Apple Fifth Avenue, and flew back home. I’ve been using it every day since — here’s what I think. My background, for context: I’ve been working in AR for many years. I built...
204
They don't make 'em like that any more: the 3.5mm headphone jack socket
What’s the real reason that cellphone manufacturers stopped fitting this simple, robust connector?
205
Implementing neural networks on the "3 cent" 8-bit microcontroller
Bouyed by the surprisingly good performance of neural networks with quantization aware training on the CH32V003, I wondered how far this can be pushed. How much can we compress a neural network whi…
206
Memory Mapping an FPGA from an STM32
I teased at this a bit in my previous posts and finally have a setup I’m happy with, so I thought I’d do a more in-depth writeup.
207
The Orange Pi 5 Plus
The launch of the Raspberry Pi 5 was a bit… underwhelming, to be honest. Part of that is because the Raspberry Pi Foundation favors incremental improvement ...
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We don't need a DAC on the ESP32-S3
There's no DAC on the ESP32-S3 - but that's not a problem - we'll just use PDM!
210
Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked
What follows is the story of how I fixed not one, but two, different flawed Altera USB Blaster clone devices that never worked correctly after I bought them.