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Glowing mercury thyratrons: inside a 1940s Teletype switching power supply
We recently started restoring a Teletype Model 19, a Navy communication system introduced in the 1940s. 14 This Teletype was powered by a b...
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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
2312
Vintage video game cartridges with built-in modems
A lot of contemporary video game players take online communications for granted—after all, online services have been a standard feature in consoles for nearly fifteen years at this point1. However, before the ubiquity of the internet there was a time when some clever cartridges let gamers run up to the...
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The digital ranging system that measured the distance to the Apollo spacecraft
During the Apollo missions to the Moon, a critical task for NASA was determining the spacecraft's position. To accomplish this, they devel...
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Goodwatch – A Ham Radio Wristwatch (2020)
The GoodWatch is my replacement circuit board for Casio’s modern calculator watches, adding support for 70cm and 33cm amateur bands while retaining three years of battery life and most of the watch’s features. It uses the CC430F6147 chip from Texas Instruments, and the watchband forms an untuned random wire antenna…
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MirrorMirror: A Raspberry Pi-Powered Magic Mirror
A magic mirror is a raspberry pi powered monitor behind a double sided mirror. A mostly black web page allows you to add some widgets to the mirror’s reflection as if by magic. This version includes widgets for displaying the weather forecast, the date/time and a nice randomly generated greeting. No low level hardware…
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I Built a Stereo Vision Board for Hardware Hackers
This article was written entirely by a human, for humans. I tend to get excited about certain chips. This time, it was a microprocessor: The Rockchip …
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Why the Black MacBook Cost More
From 2006 until 2008, Apple sold one of the coolest Macs ever: the black MacBook. The black MacBook was sold alongside the more popular — and less expensive — white MacBook. The price difference between the white and black models is often brought up when discussing Apple’s various strategies around product design and…
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Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
The process of building a remotely controlled tractor.
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Chinese Crankshafts (2012)
To read an updated on this story please click on this link: Chinese Crankshafts for Corvairs, update 2/17/13. If the pictures on this story are small, try clicking on the F5 key at the top of you…
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Using ThinkPad T480 as a mobile phone
A collection of Maroš Grego's works.
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A few CPU hardware bugs
Catherine (Whitequark)’s recent observations on poorly-engineered firmware reminded me of a few mistakes I’ve seen in vendors’ CPUs; some unimportant and others surprisingly bad. Since I’ve never seen these widely discussed, here’s some discussion and links to supporting evidence to make them more widely known, since…
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OKTO35 3D-Printed Analog Film Movie Camera
In the very beginning, there was … well, this thing. The OKTO35 Mk1. A machine that could (barely) shoot and scan its own 35mm film movies.
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Hilbert Transform
Concise summary of the Hilbert transform: mathematics, effects on signals, and applications in telecommunications.
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JAMMA Video Standard
Everyone had their weird pandemic hobby, right? Well, mine is that I bought an arcade video game. Not the whole cabinet - just a board, to hook up ...
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Adam74: A terminal for a small 8-bit computer
Something that struck me reading about the history of the Apple I computer was the fairly simple “ASCII bus” that it used for input and output. As I understand it a hobbyist back in the day could get an ASCII keyboard that quite literally presented as an interface a header giving 7-bits of ASCII and an additional…
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Typewriter Plotters (2022)
Did you know there were typewriters that used ball point pens to draw not just text but also graphics? I’ve collected several of these over the years. Read on to discover a world that you didn’t know existed.
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Linux Developer Laptops: Dell's Precision 5500 series reigns supreme (2019)
I’m an entrepreneur and engineer focused on AI developer tools and data systems. My principal role is Founder at Kenn Software . I am also a Principal Architect at Posit , where I contribute to Python and AI strategy. I was a founder of Voltron Data , Ursa Labs (with Posit ), and DataPad. I wrote Python for Data…
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Recovering a password-protected ThinkPad T60
An illustrated overview about the process of clearing the supervisor password from a ThinkPad T60, based on guides that some smart and persistent people have written.
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Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison
Note: I also posted a separate review of some A2 'Application Performance' class cards, see this post: A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi. As a part-time tinkerer and full-time developer, I have been fascinated by single board computers (SBCs) since the first Raspberry Pi was…
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Sega 3-D Glasses: How did they work?
Most people have two eyes, allowing for a stereoscopic view of reality.[citation needed]. Nevertheless, video games are generally designed to run on monitors...