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Sony FX-300 Jackal: A technological marvel of the late 70s (2021)
I’m a child of the 1970s and I’m glad I never knew about the Sony FX-300 “Jackal 300.” It would have been the ultimate unobtainable machine of my dreams…this, even des…
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
2192
The Beautiful Diablo 2 Resurrected Machine
The last game I played extensively was "Diablo 2" during the year 2000 when Internet finally became affordable in France. I loved that it was a difficult game to master, I loved the mandatory grinding which made accomplishments meaningful. I loved to trade and the economy players invented.
2193
Hacking Christmas lights
I went to Costco the other day with my wife to pick up some Christmas lights. While there, I found the most awesome christmas lights ever: the GE Color Effects G-35 .
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SIMD < SIMT < SMT: Parallelism in Nvidia GPUs (2011)
Programmable NVIDIA GPUs are very inspiring to hardware geeks, proving that processors with an original, incompatible programming model can become widely used.
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Some small suggestions for the Intel instruction set
Programmers trying to make crypto run fast often say things like "Why can't the CPU designer just add a 128-bit multiplication instruction?" Sometimes these questions turn into academic papers analyzing the cycle counts that would be obtained from various instruction-set extensions. What's missing from most of these…
2198
3D printer community revolting against Makerbot's new closed-source printer
When I woke up, my RSS reader showed some "occupy thingiverse" things posted on Thingiverse. I'm still trying to figure out all that happen...
2199
Drone Physics
Equations governing dynamics and control of a multirotor UAV
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Understanding Image Sharpness (2003)
The sharpness of a photographic imaging system or of a component of the system (lens, film, image sensor, scanner, enlarging lens, etc.) is characterized by a parameter called Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) , also known as spatial frequency response. We present a unique visual explanation of MTF and how it relates…
2202
Fixing the Ethernet Board from a Vintage Xerox Alto
A Xerox Alto system on the East coast had Ethernet problems, so the owner sent me the Ethernet board to diagnose. (After restoring our Alto,...
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Warm up your MacBook (2019)
Who else hates putting their hands on an icy metal laptop after it's been riding outside in your cold backpack? Here's a one-line solution.
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Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)
From home temperature monitoring to a Kubernetes cluster hosting a live Drupal website, I have a lot of experience running Raspberry Pis. I've used every model through the years, and am currently using a mix of A+, 2 model B, and 4 model B Pis. The 3 model B+ was the first generation that had me concerned more about…
2207
Testing the Raspberry Pi 500+'s new mechanical keyboard
Instead of a traditional review of a new Pi product, I thought I'd split things up on my blog, and write two separate posts; this one about the Pi 500+'s new mechanical keyboard, and a separate post about hacking in an eGPU on the Pi 500+, for a massive uplift in gaming performance and local LLMs. The Raspberry Pi…
2208
2012 MacBook Pro Powers on By Itself on Rough Roads
While driving around in the wilds on the bumpy roads of the White Mountains , my MacBook Pro with Retina display keeps waking up. When I pull it out of the leather bag I keep it in, I find that the battery is partly drained, and it is hot.
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Installing Linux into a 286 laptop from the year 1989
Ever wondered what useful things you could do with a 32 year old laptop? Well, this is one option: In this project I added a Raspberry PI Zero to the insides of the laptop. Both are connected via a…
2210
Debugging my wife's alarm clock
My wife's alarm clock has been acting up lately. Sporadic at first but then every day, it wouldn't blare in the morning at the set time. Instead, when it was supposed to go off it would... reset itself. The time would start flashing in that "I'm confused because the power went out" sort of way.
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DIY Adapter: Using an e-bike battery to run a laptop
The goal here is to grab power from external battery packs of varying voltages and supply power to 'desktop replacement' sized laptops. This same topology can be used for Dell barrel jack systems.
2213
TCP/IP over audio
We present a simple to use implementation of networking across ultrasonic frequencies, by making use of Gnuradio and a microphone and speakers. This allows you to use TCP/IP , UDP across an audio link.
2214
An 8-tube module from a 1954 IBM 705 mainframe: it's a key debouncer
IBM's vacuum tube computers of the 1950s were built from pluggable modules, each holding eight tubes and the associated components. I recent...
2215
Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet
I built a device that allows a pinball machine from 1984 to automatically upload scores to the internet. The device taps into the machine’s memory bus and monitors the game state, uploading scores after each game.
2216
Reverse-engineering a vintage power supply chip from die photos
I recently did a PC power supply teardown so I figured it would be interesting to go deeper and see what happens inside the power supply'...
2217
Why the Z-80's data pins are scrambled
If you look closely at the datasheet for a Z-80 chip, you'll notice the data pins are in a random-looking order. The address pins (A) are ni...
2218
The 101 of analog signal filtering (2024)
Some intuition about this topic can be developed without summoning the ghost of Pierre-Simon Laplace.
2219
NEC’s Tetris Processor
Tetris is a classic time-waster, both in and outside of the office. What good is any computing device if it can’t play this game? Tokyo System House certainly thought so, and ported it to the NEC mini5 line of CP/M-based word processors. Let’s preserve it for future generations and then see what it’s like!
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