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My Laptop Bit Me – The Shocking Truth (2012)
Apple aren't the only company with products that can feel tingly or buzzy to a light touch, it is all due to the widespread use of switched...
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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
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Air Support in a Backpack: The Switchblade
In March 2022, it was reported that the United States was sending over some Switchblades to Ukraine.
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ThinkPad as a Server: The Follow-Up
The ThinkPad as a server is back, this time with a couple of adjustments.
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The Raspberry Pi’s Hardware Random Number Generator
Hey! This is a bit old! Things may have changed and I haven’t necessarily fixed them. Most computers can’t create true random numbers. They use a formula which makes a very long stream …
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iPhone 8 Plus Camera Review
The iPhone 8 Plus across western India — Portrait Lighting put to work on real faces, plus the quieter upgrades that matter to creative pros.
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Teardown of a quartz crystal oscillator and the tiny IC inside
The quartz oscillator is an important electronic circuit, providing highly-accurate timing signals at a low cost. A quartz crystal has the...
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A look inside the chips that powered the landmark Polaroid SX-70 instant camera
The revolutionary Polaroid SX-70 1 camera (1972) was a marvel of engineering: the world's first instant SLR camera. This iconic camera wa...
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Train and Weather Tracker with Raspberry Pi and E-Ink
A dashboard with the weather forecast and top headlines is an easy, but useful little project.
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A Tale of Two Zippers
Recently, Akiba took me to visit his friend’s zipper factory. I love visiting factories: no matter how simple the product, I learn something new.
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Autoregressive Language Model on the 6502 Processor
A language model on a 1975 MOS 6502 processor, using a tiny Mamba-based language model and custom 8-bit ternary inference engine, used to generate text on a BBC Micro from the 1980s.
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The killer features of the Steam Deck
In the beginning of the year I gave myself a late Christmas gift and bought a Steam Deck for myself. There were two main reasons I decided to buy it:
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Spur – RISC IV: The Lisp Multiprocessor Workstation
The hugely ambitious 'Symbolic Processing Using RISC' project from UC Berkeley
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Evolutionary algorithms and analog electronic circuits
I've been working for a while on a program that automatically generates analog electronic circuits using evolutionary algorithms. It's still very much a work in progress, but I've used it to generate some useful circuits. Current workings of the program is as follows: Programmer decides a goal function, possible…
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Electronic project kits: hands on with a vintage 160-in-1 (2016)
In this day and age with the bewildering availability of electronics readily available, deciding on a project to embark on can be…
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Atreus – kit to build your own mechanical keyboard
My last post documented my initial exposure to the wild world of custom keyboards and the numerous ways it's possible to improve on the conventional design. As I dug deeper into the topic, I was struck with the simplicity of the underlying concepts. While the Ergodox is a notable and admirable achievement of…
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Exploring the BBC Micro:bit Software Stack and OS
If you grew up in the UK and went to school during the 1980’s or 1990’s there’s a good chance that this picture brings back fond memories:
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Tracing the roots of the 8086 instruction set to the Datapoint 2200 minicomputer
The Intel 8086 processor started the x86 architecture that is still extensively used today. The 8086 has some quirky characteristics: it i...
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A DX7 USB Dongle
The amazing Rene Stange added USB Gadget (i.e. device) support to the Circle bare metal Raspberry Pi environment a while ago so I’ve now incorporated that into MiniDexed. This allows MiniDexe…
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LM8560, the eternal chip from the 1980 years
Site about nature and political themes. Europe, Capitalism, anti-captalism, communism, socialism, animals, cats, veganism, astronomy, religion and more
2241
z386: An Open-Source 80386 Built Around Original Microcode
This is the fifth installment of the 80386 series . The FPGA CPU is now far enough along to run real software, and this post is about how it works. z386 is a 386-class CPU built around the original Intel microcode, in the same spirit as z8086 .
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How Intel Missed the iPhone: The XScale Era
Challenging the conventional narrative on Intel's smartphone miss
2246
Eye-tracking is a missing input device for VR experiences
So you want to shoot lasers from your eyes, hmm?
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Why FPGA manufacturers keep their bitstream formats secret
Every FPGA vendor keeps the bitstream format for their device secret. Only the tools provided in binary-only format by the vendor (and a select few third parties under NDA) can generate these bitstreams.
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A Small Ode to the CRT
I used to hate Cathode Ray Tubes . As a kid in Europe, everything flickered at 50Hz, or made a loud whistle at 15.625KHz (back when I could still hear it). CRTs just seemed crude, “electro-brutalist” contraptions from the valve era. They were heavy, and delicate, and distorted, and blurry, and whistled, and gave…
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Unlocking the Duron and Athlon using the pencil (2007)
Unlocking the Duron and Athlon Using the Pencil Introduction The best and most stable way to overclock your Athlon and Duron CPU is ...
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Kona EV Hacking
Header page for hacks and investigations of the Hyundai Kona electric vehicle