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Here's why you should not buy a Drobo
Jan Rychter: Tech Consulting, Product Development, Data Science.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
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Tapo (Rust/Python library) now speaks TP-Link's TPAP protocol
tapo now logs in over the TPAP protocol, so the Third-Party Compatibility switch in the Tapo app can stay off. Also new: H200 and H500 camera hubs with recording downloads, and plug schedules and timers.
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Dumping MiniDisc Media
Update 2022: Web MiniDisc Pro can access NetMD devices through the browser and can also download protected files! If you have music on a collection of MiniDisc media and want to finally copy the data off onto modern media (or the cloud!), here are simple instructions for some different solutions:
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An accessible one-handed keyboard, inspired by FrogPad
A couple of years ago, I was in an incident that reduced the strength in my left shoulder. I’ve been waiting for an operation to restore the function to that shoulder, but we were warned the post-operative recovery period would be several months. So I started looking for keyboard options...
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A Full Hardware Guide to Deep Learning
In this guide I analyse hardware from CPU to SSD and their impact on performance for deep learning so that you can choose the hardware that you really need.
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Making Screenshots of Test Equipment Old and New
Last year, I created Fake Parallel Printer , a tool to capture the output of the parallel printer port of old-ish test equipment so that it can be converted into screenshots for blog posts etc.
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Capcom CPS-1 Graphic system study
As I keep on exploring the internals of the machine that animated so many hours of my childhood, I came to study its GFX system.
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Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound chip from die photos (2017)
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
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Building a simple VGA-adapter for an 8-bit self made computer
(Update 2014-10-30: Due to some interest in this project, I added schematics for the GALs)
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M3 CPU cores have become more versatile
M3 chips widen the gap between Pro and Max variants. They also change relative performance between P and E cores to make M3 CPUs more versatile.
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TSMC faces tough choices amid rumors for Intel foundry collaboration
Following a routine board meeting that did not present any surprises to the market, TSMC executives, alongside Taiwan’s Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs, are set to engage in negotiations with the U.S.
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The Joys of Unix Keyboards
A decade or so ago while helping a friends father clean out an old building, we came across an ancient Sun Microsystems server. We found it curious. Everything about it was different from what we were used to. The command line was black text on a white background, the connectors strange and foreign, and the keyboard…
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iAPX432: Gordon Moore, Risk and Intel’s Super-CISC Failure
The legacy of Intel's over-ambitious 32-bit 'micromainframe' failure.
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Raspberry Pi microSD follow-up, SD Association fools me twice?
/ Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, \ \ prepare to die. (Klingon Proverb) / -------------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || || (Excerpt from Ansible for DevOps, chapter 12.) The fallout from this year's microSD card performance comparison has turned into quite a…
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AMD's AI Future Is Rack Scale 'Helios'
Key Announcements from AMD Advancing AI 2025
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Using a tiny HC32L110 ARM chip
A while ago, Hackaday highlighted a new chip, the HC32L110. This chip was one of the many ARM-based microcontrollers that sprung up in China, but this one was remarkable because its diminuitive size: it came in an 16-pin WCSP package of a miniscule 1.6x1.4mm. Aside from that, it seems to be a chip that is somewhat…
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Inside the HP Nanoprocessor
The Nanoprocessor is a mostly-forgotten processor developed by Hewlett-Packard in 1974 1 as a microcontroller 2 for their products. Stra...
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Hiding your data in plain sight: USB hardware hiding
This article will describe the possibility of hiding data in any kind of USB hardware. Even though USB data carriers come in various sizes and forms, which already sometimes makes them hard to recognize, this approach could even make it worse. Any USB device could be a data carrier and thus from a forensics point of…
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Examining circuit boards from the Space Shuttle's I/O Processor
The Space Shuttle's five 1 general-purpose computers played a critical role in each flight: controlling the engines, monitoring thousands o...
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Microcode inside the Intel 8087 floating-point chip: register exchange
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This chip...
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Pieca: A Raspberry Pi Camera System for Leica M Mount Lenses
Taking pictures and geeking out over cameras was one of my first hobbies starting with an old Olympus point and shoot, I then moved up to a DSLR upgrading as new and exciting technology became acce…
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C64 Theremin
The Theremin is one of the earliest electronic instruments. It's played by moving one's hands in front of two antennas: One controls pitch and the other controls volume.
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The Intel 386 processor die: the clock circuit
Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip. In this blog post, I'll examine the clock-generati...
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“It's done in hardware so it's cheap” (2012)
This is one of these things that look very obvious to me, to the point where it seems not worth discussing. However, I've heard the idea that "hardware magically makes things cheap" from several PhDs over the years. So apparently, if you aren't into hardware, it's not obvious at all.
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SSD as Long Term Storage Testing
2022 September 10 What is the best media for long term storage is a question that I read frequently from online forums. First and foremost, as far as I’m aware there is no real “set it and forget it” long term storage. In this digital age, data needs to be validated regularly and cycled to a new media every 5-10 years…