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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 326 posts.
A number of 70s computing systems had nine-bit bytes, most prominently the PDP-10, but today 1 [ 1 Apparently, it was the System/360 that really set the standard here. ] all systems use 8-bit bytes and that now seems natural. 2 [ 2 Though you still see RFCs use "octet", and the C standard has a CHAR_BITS macro, to…
I’ve been hinting on X/Twitter about my use of the Daylight DC-1 as a programming environment, and after about a year of use, it’s time to write about it in longer form. This isn’t a full product review, but rather an experience report on coding in sunlight. It’s also about the Boox Tab Ultra – which has a different…
Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of ...
Many classic Macs came with — or supported — displays running at 512x384 pixels, but many compact Macs, ranging from the original 1984 machine up through 1991’s Macintosh Classic II had built-in CRTs running at 512x342 pixels. That covers all black-and-white compact Macs with a 9-inch screen. The later Color Classic…
The Walkie-Textie is a simple handheld device with a 12-key keypad and OLED display that allows you to send and receive text messages using the LoRa wireless protocol. It's ideal for situations where there's no mobile signal, such as when you're camping or hiking in a remote area, when you don't want the cost of a…
On February 18, 2025, Humane announced it would be shutting down all services for the always online Humane Ai Pin in ten days, following a sale to HP . I had been vaguely aware of the Ai Pin, definitely more so than the average tech person, as I have a close friend who was one of the earliest adopters and eventually…
One day on my drive home, I saw three towers. One of them had a bunch of blinking white lights, another one had red lights that kind of faded in and out, and the third one, well, it wasn't doing anything. I'm lucky to have a radio engineer for a dad, so Dad: why do some towers blink?
Published: 25-07-2025 23:37 | Last update: 02-08-2025 21:31 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
It's real and it's magnificent
The Apollo 13 astronauts were stranded in space. Their survival depended on if they could make a carbon dioxide absorber inside the spacecraft.
I wrote a small script that runs in the background, polling for the state of an $8 smart plug .
As it turns out, “thrift shopping” in Japan via the internet can be both very enjoyable as well as very dangerous. In this series of posts, I’ve been examining various optical med…
Jailbreaking an old Kindle and turning it into a school dashboard using Cloudflare Workers, Puppeteer, and image processing.
Have you ever looked at an NVMe drive and thought to yourself, 'Hey, this would be 31.7% cooler with HDMI ports?'
During the Apollo flights to the Moon, the astronauts observed the spacecraft's orientation on a special instrument called the FDAI (Flight ...
Content copyright © 1995 - 2025 to Bruce Simpson (aka Aardvark), the logo was kindly created for Aardvark Daily by the folks at aardvark.co.uk
I was expecting this to be pretty bad - but it actually came out quite nicely!
Content copyright © 1995 - 2025 to Bruce Simpson (aka Aardvark), the logo was kindly created for Aardvark Daily by the folks at aardvark.co.uk
Just say no to LM741 and LM324 / LM358.
In 1985, Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor, the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture. To improve performance, the ...
I recently spent a few weeks running a conference for a community of researchers and writers in a historic chateau in the French…
It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at an architecture that’s completely new to me, and I haven’t done any since creating my new scheme for dedicated platform guides. I’…
View the code on GitHub
Deriving the basic mathematical properties of the Smith chart from electrical engineering
A delve into CD ripping and metadata
This is part 3 of my ongoing series about LATENTRED, my project to create an open source 1U managed Ethernet switch from scratch.
Though I spend the majority of my time working with microcontroller class devices, I also have an embarassingly robust collection of single board computers (SBC), including a few different Raspberry Pi models, the BeagleV Starlight Beta (RIP), and more. Typically when setting up these devices for whatever automation…
As you may remember, or completely not know, I have a bit of a fascination with old rotary phones . Occasionally, when people learn about this fascination, they donate their old rotary phones to me, so I have ended up with a small collection.
