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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
Notice Note: As of 2022/10/25 the information in this series is slightly outdated. See Part 5 for more up to date information. I take no responsibility for any damages due to the information or steps provided on this site. The content is for educational purposes only. You modify your own car’s firmware at your…
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Longtime readers may remember a previous article where we implemented TI-99/4A BASIC as a Scripting Language for modern computers. Recently I got nostalgic for the actual hardware so I got my 99 out of the closet where it had been for a decade o…
I've stumbled across a technique for drawing holograms directly upon a plastic plate by hand. It sounds impossible, but I've been sitting on the livingroom sofa making holographic images of floating polyhedra, words, 3D starfields, opaque objects, etc. No laser, no isolation table, no darkroom, no expensive film…
Last week’s adventures with the Exidy Sorcerer led me to write a Z80 version of the LZ4 decompressor I’d previously used on the SNES, the CoCo, and the Genesis. At this point, this has …
Creating a quarter-scale replica of the iconic BeBox computer, complete with blinkenlights and custom case design
In 1980, Intel released the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster. As well as arithmetic...
TL;DR: The how and why of the new 6502 emulator in the chips project.
Ethical Hacking and Cybersecurity Blog
Z80 Explorer is a Z80 netlist-level simulator capable of running Z80 machine code and also an educational tool with features that help reverse engineer and understand this chip better.
No. But they don’t need to. In preparation for the 5th test flight of Starship, SpaceX announced that they would try to catch the booster using “Mechazilla’s chopsticks.” Later du…
Meet my BBC Master, plus 5 1/4" floppy disk drive, and three-button mouse
I got the following e-mail from a producer/engineer: “I just want to try and alert you to the potential seismic scam happening with this Atmos roll out. Â Atmos catalog remixing is being done…
The convoluted and ultimately pointless tale of how I connected a retro 80s 5" BW TV to my PC as a 3rd monitor
Part 1 of the story of Motorola's 8-bit microprocessor design
If you often get static electricity shocks when touching your laptop or your office chair, or your monitor goes black when you stand up, this may interest you.
I was happy with the Remarkable 2 and when the Remarkable Pro came out I decided to go with a second one in order to be able to see two pages at once : one as a reference for reading and one for writing, as one would normally do with paper. Expensive approach, I know.
The noise floor is a lot lower in the forest
The most interesting keyboards I ever acquired
I generally avoid messing with Li-ion battery packs, but these are both Ni-mh and expensive.
Improving the Xbox 360 Bad Update exploit to trigger nearly instantaneously with near 100% success rate.
Mike Kohn's music, software, and electronics projects.
[Edit] This post sparked a conversation on Ycombinator ! I am concerned about Apple's move to its own home-grown processors. It's not because I'm worried about the new silicon, or Apple's ability to make high-performance CPUs, or even because I am worried about changing architectures. I survived…
Outside of a very few specialized fields high-security locks are almost totally unknown. Even in the field of locksmithing where high-security locks are known, they are often misunderstood. Today I am going to offer you a primer on the fascinating world of high-security mechanical locks, the securit
I needed to log when a light switched on and off during the night as part of debugging an oddly behaving movement sensor. To do that I built...
I had meant to post on this some time back and forgot. I don’t altogether like plug cutters much, but good quality ones work well in drill presses (pillar drill UK). It’s the drill press that’s the problem more than anything. Often when I need a plug
