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Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
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1TB Hard Drive Prices up 180% in a Month
The Newegg price charts on Camelegg sum this up illustratively:
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Geeking Out with UEFI
Some people may think some of my past posts get into the weeds, exploring the technical depths of Windows Autopilot, Intune, Windows 10, ConfigMgr, etc. But I would say those generally only g…
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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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Inside Look at Valve's New Lighthouse Tracking System
While walking around the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend, I stumbled across an amazing piece of technology: Valve's "Lighthouse" tracking system. Valve's demos were (supposedly) a major contributor to Oculus' fundraising efforts and ultimate sale to Facebook, and this device may have been a key piece of those demos…
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Meet the IOIO - USB breakout board for android w/48 digital+analog IO pins
I'm very excited to announce the launch of a new product I've been working on for the past months! IOIO (pronounced: yo-yo ) is a produc...
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Helmdar: 3D Scanning Brooklyn on Rollerblades
One of my favorite joys is exploring a city late at night on rollerblades. I’ve been doing it fairly regularly for about 10 years now, first in Boston and then in NYC. Every time day turns to night and back again a city takes a breath. At night people flow out or huddle up in buildings, leaving the streets clear for…
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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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I toured Unitree's factory. I'm more bullish on the West
Everyone thinks China's robot factories are automated. They aren't. The robots are Chinese; the robots that make robots will be Western.
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Big Sur on Unsupported Macs
My macOS Big Sur Patcher allowed countless users of older Macs to enjoy the new design and features of macOS Big Sur.
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The Reliability of Optical Disks
How long will burned CDs / DVDs / BluRays last?
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System76 Thelio: A Review
The bottom line : Thelio, System76’s new “open hardware” desktop, is a small, beautiful, and powerful desktop computer that hits every high point anyone could have expected, faltering only in the inherent limitations of its small size.
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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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Hyperloop lets you travel on a resonant acoustic wave?
Elon Musk is a fascinating guy, and his Hyperloop concept equally so. Now that the details have started trickling out, almost in the form...
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The Moore's Law free lunch is over. Now welcome to the hardware jungle.
Or, A Heterogeneous Supercomputer in Every Pocket In the twilight of Moore’s Law, the transitions to multicore processors, GPU computing, and HaaS cloud computing are not separate trends, bu…
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Transmitting data via ultrasound without any special equipment
There are secret messages flying all around you all the time, being transmitted via, most of the time, electromagnetic waves going from antenna to antenna. ELOs “Secret Messages” is a song about posting conspiracy theories via WiFi. But what if you need to get a few bytes from device A to device B (one of the hard…
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Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis
Earlier this month I covered Jonathan Clark's effort to reverse-engineer the Pi Zero 2 W, and just yesterday, I discovered TubeTime reverse-engineered the Compute Module 5. i reverse-engineered the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5! check it out at github.com/schlae/cm5-r... [image or embed] — Tube Time…
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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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My foxhole radio
As a child I'd made a crystal radio set and had been meaning to make one again when I came across stories of foxhole or PoW radios made f...
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How the Z80's registers are implemented
The 8-bit Z80 microprocessor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The Z80...
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Precursor’s Custom PCBs
While the last few updates about Precursor have focused on evidence-based trust and security, this update is more about the process of making Precursor itself. There is an essential link between evidence-based trust and understanding the manufacturing process: to convince yourself that something has been constructed…
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Yamaha DX7 reverse-engineering, part III: Inside the log-sine ROM
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer for 1980s pop music. It used two custom digital chips to generate so...
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Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition review
Please note: I've updated this review in several spots and have highlighted these updates like this . Please also check out the comments-se...
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Qualcomm cancels Snapdragon Dev Kit, refunds all orders
This afternoon I received the following email from Arrow, regarding the Snapdragon Developer Kit for Windows: Dear Valued Customer, Please see this important message from Qualcomm: ”At Qualcomm, we are dedicated to pioneering leading technology and delivering premium experiences to our valued customers. The launch of…