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Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
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A Sound Card Before Its Time
A mysterious full-length sound card recently arrived at the OS/2 Museum. It was clearly manufactured by IBM in 1985, and sports a 20 MHz Texas Instrument TMS32010 DSP (the DSP is the large black DIP chip near the lower left corner, not the ceramic gold cap chip).
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The printer that wouldn't print: Fixing an IBM 1401 mainframe from the 1960s
The Computer History Museum has two operational IBM 1401 computers used for demos , but a few weeks ago one computer suddenly couldn't prin...
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Inside the 8086 processor, tiny charge pumps create a negative voltage
Introduced in 1978, the revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor led to the x86 processors used in most desktop and server computing today....
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Tofolli gates are all you need
Any Boolean function can be computed with Tofolli gates, and Tofolli gates are reversible, and so any Boolean function can be computed reversibly.
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Wifibroadcast – Analog-like transmission of live video data
Wifibroadcast is a project aimed at the live transmission of HD video (and other) data using wifi radios. One prominent use case is to transmit camera images for a first person view (FPV) of remote…
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Lisp Badge – Self-contained ATmega1284 Lisp computer
This is a self-contained computer with its own display and keyboard, based on an ATmega1284, that you can program in the high-level language Lisp:
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Homemade synthetic aperture radar
Second version of the 6 GHz FMCW radar now with SAR images
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A Hardware Privacy Monitor for iPhones
Andrew “bunnie” Huang and Edward Snowden have designed a hardware device that attaches to an iPhone and monitors it for malicious surveillance activities, even in instances where the phone’s operating system has been compromised. They call it an Introspection Engine, and their use model is a journalist who is…
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RISC-V is getting MSIs
Message signaled interrupts or MSIs describe a way to signal an interrupt without a dedicated interrupt request pin (IRQ). One of the most prevalent uses for MSIs is the PCI bus, and the PCI specification defines the MSI and MSI-X standards. The potential benefits may include: (1) reduced number of direct wires from…
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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 3: Inside the disk drive
I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto — a legendary minicomputer from 1973 that helped set the direction for personal computing. This post desc...
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Emulating an iPod Touch 2G using QEMU
My personal website.
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Scamp – a homebrew 16-bit CPU
I have reached a good milestone on the SCAMP hardware: it can now execute code! It runs all the way through the test program correctly.
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Go on Very Small Hardware
How low we can Go and still do something useful? I recently bought this ridiculously cheap board: I bought it for three reasons. First, I have never dealt (as a programmer) with STM32F0 series. Second, the STM32F10x series is getting old. MCUs belonging to the STM32F0 family are just as cheap if not cheaper and has…
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Hardware trojans under a microscope (2022)
Table of Contents
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GRC SpinRite
I feel like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with suspect hard drives. I mean, like, back in high school. These days I almost never do, or on the occasion that I have storage trouble, it's a drive that has completely stopped responding at all and there's little to do besides replacing it. One time…
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The LaserDisc
The first mass market optical media
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A Year of 3D Printing
If you'd asked me a few years back if I thought I'd buy a 3D printer, I would have said no. My experience of 3D printers back when I was in college was that they were very slow, expensive, frequently failed mid-print, and needed constant calibration...
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The advantages of programming on a small netbook
Most software developers prefer to work on "fast" computers, and I am normally one of them. Many of my tools work best with lots of memory, ...
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Raspberry Pi 4: Hardware accelerated video decoding (GPU) in Chromium
Following these steps, you will add hardware acceleration decoding capabilities to the Chromium web browser. This is an extension to the tutorial about DRM for Chromium on the Raspberry Pi. Videos from Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, Youtube, etc. can be decoded using the Raspberry Pi GPU.
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MiniDisc Hacking
Most MiniDisc aficionados are aware of unit hacking to gain access to new features. The unit that perhaps benefits the most from this is the Sony MZ-N510, which also comes in the N520 and NF610 variants. The 2001 model R700 can be hacked to add many features of its upscale brother, the R900 , as well as the Type-R…
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Reverse-engineering the first FPGA chip, the XC2064
A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can implement arbitrary digital logic, anything from a microprocessor to a video generator or crypt...
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PC Floppy Copy Protection: Softguard Superlok
This is part 2 of a series on PC floppy copy protection methods. You can read Part 1, covering Formaster Copy-Lock here . Softguard System...
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Magic Leap – Separating Magic and Reality
The Goal – Explain What is Magic Leap Doing Magic Leap has a way of talking about what they hope to do someday and not necessarily what they can do anytime soon. Their patent applications ar…
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The Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 808...
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