2071
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…
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
2072
How to build a circular LCD clock
In our kitchen, the only device that displays the time is our oven! :D Looking at it was always a bit annoying.
2073
How I discovered my left AirPod was bad
tl;dr: My left AirPod had some hardware issue. I got a new one. Now the AirPods work great. The morning Apple's AirPods went up for sale, I was boarding a plane, and had just gotten to my seat on the plane. I knew they'd be in short supply (though I didn't know just how short—my local Apple Store only gets a small…
2074
Pine64 (64-bit quad core for $15) Quick Start Guide
RayHightower.com - Tech company founder. Commercial real estate investor. Building teams, software, and companies. Located in Phoenix, AZ, USA.
2075
A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
One of the three basic circuit elements just got a lot smaller for the very first time, in what promises to be a trillion-dollar…
2076
2077
2078
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…
2079
96-core ARM supercomputer using the NanoPi-Fire3
Building a high performance supercomputer for under £100 (£550 including twelve Fire3s). Parts list, benchmarks and downloadable plans for laser-cutting the acrylic case.
2080
Silicon die teardown: a look inside an early 555 timer chip
If you've played around with electronic circuits, you probably know the 555 timer integrated circuit, 1 said to be the world's best-selli...
2081
Inside a 20-Watt Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier from Apollo
How did the Apollo astronauts communicate on their trip to the Moon, 240,000 miles back to Earth? They used a 32-pound amplifier, built ar...
2082
Hacking Ethernet out of Fibre Channel cards
This story, like another in the past , started as an eBay purchase that I would soon regret. I was scrolling through my favorite eBay supplier when I found a listing titled Job Lot Of Roughly 350 Various Network Cards . This of course piqued my interest. Some close photo inspection identified a whole load of cards in…
2083
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...
2084
Repairing a 1960s mainframe: Fixing the IBM 1401's core memory and power supply
A few weeks ago, I wanted to use one of the vintage IBM 1401 mainframe computers at the Computer History Museum, but the computer wasn't wor...
2085
AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz
Cores are the new megahertz, at least for enterprise servers. We've gone quickly from 32, to 64, to 80, to 128, and now to 192-cores on a single CPU socket! Amazon built Graviton 4, Google built Axiom, but if you want your own massive Arm server, Ampere's the only game in town. And fastest Arm CPU in the world is…
2086
My Keyboard
I use a Datahand keyboard . It’s the best thing that’s happened to my fingers and wrists since... It’s the best thing that has ever happened to my fingers and wrists. I see a lot of parallels between the Datahand and pure functional programming (lol). They both take lots of commitment. They change the entire way you…
2087
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.
2088
2089
What Happened to Abit Motherboards
Capacitor plague and bad accounting practices were a lethal one-two punch
2090
A one-bit processor explained: reverse-engineering the vintage MC14500B
The Motorola MC14500B 1 is a 1-bit processor introduced in 1976. While a 1-bit processor might seem almost useless, 2 it was marketed as...
2091
2092
Controlling My A/C with a Gameboy
Last year, I was lucky enough to be gifted a Gameboy Color in great shape. Apart from its intended gameplay features, I also wanted to try and build something meaningful with it, so I made this application to control my air-conditioner over its existing, reverse-engineered infrared protocol.
2093
Converting a Cisco 7609 into a beer tap (2021)
Last year I thought that we had reached some sort of peak in terms of how far one can go in building useless things by converting a 42U rack into a
2094
Nicole gets a real computer – the Microsoft Z80 SoftCard (2020)
So there I was, very happy with my Apple ][plus. But then I saw someone on the internet post, and it seems that my Apple is an overpriced box with a toy micr...
2095
2096
I don't know Apple's endgame for the Fn/Globe key–or if Apple does
The origin and the evolution of the most confusing modifier key
2097
Zen5's AVX512 Teardown and More
This article was supposed to be published all at once on July 30'th. But because of the staggered launch delay into August 8 and 15, some sections of this article were redacted until August 14th.
2098
Home Made TPM2.0 Module
Introduction With the recent launch of Windows 11 Microsoft also made having a hardware TPM module mandatory. Although this technology is not new (it was introduced in Windows 10 and Windows Server…
2099
Convert an existing wired doorbell into a smart doorbell using ESPHome
This article is going to show you how to convert your (existing) wired doorbell (also works for battery-powered chimes) into a smart, WiFi-enabled, doorbell. The essential components needed sets you back about $2, yes, that is correct, just two bucks. No soldering is required and you don’t
2100
Solar Powered Raspberry Pi Camera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M53eJI90ETE Update: this project was featured in issue 92 of the official Raspberry Pi magazine (download as PDF, buy the issue or subscribe). SSH-ing into a remote solar powered Raspberry Pi at the top of an apple tree has a special feeling -- almost like commanding a spaceship where…