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My toddler still loves planes, so I upgraded her radar
An adorable set of release notes
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
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Weird monitor bugs people sent me in the last 5 years
I develop 🌕 Lunar, a macOS app for getting intelligent adaptive brightness on external monitors and controlling every aspect of your monitor using DDC and other obscure protocols. I get tons of email about Lunar, especially after it became my full time “job” in 2021. A lot of those emails complain about Lunar bugs…
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Reverse Engineering iOS 18 Inactivity Reboot
Wireless and firmware hacking, PhD life, Technology
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Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes
I have come up with a new way to win at chess: I have connected up a Raspberry Pi Zero in my pocket to some buttons and vibration motors in my shoes, so that I can surreptitiously communicate with a chess engine running on the Pi. The project is called "Sockfish" because it's a way to operate Stockfish with your socks.
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Building an e-ink weather display for our home
Building a battery powered e-ink weather forecast display for our home. This was a fun Raspberry Pi project.
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Stealth Cell Tower Disguised as Printer
Rogue cellular infrastructure disguised as office printer Oliver, 2015
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Building an iPod for 2022
Personal site of Ellie Huxtable
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MacBook Pro Insomnia
Update (01.08.2025): fixed broken link, typo, clarified problematic behaviour For a number of years now I have a MacBook Pro Silicon M1 Max. It worked beautifully. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I started noticing that the battery drained over night when I left the notebook somewhere, not connected to power. This got…
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Monitoring my home's air quality with AirGradient's DIY sensor
A few months ago, I found this Hacker News post about the AirGradient DIY Air Quality Monitor. I had already been considering buying an AirThings Wave Plus sensor to monitor my home's CO2 levels, but the high price and limited 'ownership' of the data coming from it turned me off. So I built two AirGradient DIY air…
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part III
After a few weeks of investigating the Apple M1 GPU in January, I was able to draw a triangle with my own open source code . Although I began dissecting the instruction set, the shaders there were specified as machine code. A real graphics driver needs a compiler from high-level shading languages (GLSL or Metal) to a…
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USB Cheat Sheet (2022)
I spend time investigating a non-existing bug today because I misunderstood a USB term. So I made myself a cheat sheet. Maybe it will save time to someone.
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Sorting Two Tons of Lego, the Software Side
All the software written for this project is in Python. I’m not an expert python programmer, far from it but the huge number of available libraries and the fact that I can make some sense of it all without having spent a lifetime in Python made this a fairly obvious choice. There is a python distribution called…
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The AirPods Pro 3 flight problem
Testing Apple’s latest noise-cancelling earbuds at 39,000 feet reveals a potential flaw most users won’t notice, until they fly.
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Framework Laptop with Ubuntu Review
I built my own laptop over the holiday break and it’s a developer’s dream come true. I took a chance and ordered a Framework Laptop DIY Edition. I’m so glad I did. The Framework is an excellent platform to customize and build a very capable and stable Linux machine for development. Here’s what I love about it and…
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How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS
By segregating macOS background tasks on Efficiency cores, M1 Macs can run user apps unfettered on their Performance cores. And that feels really fast.
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Rotary Keyboard
Bodging a rotary dial into a mechanical keyboard
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Considerations for a long-running Raspberry Pi
Keeping a Raspberry Pi online and working with zero intervention for weeks, months, or years is somewhat of an art form. Several classes of things can go wrong, and you need to consider how your Pi will recover from each of them.
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Fixing an Elgato HD60 S HDMI capture device with the help of Ghidra
This post has a little bit of everything. Hardware diagnostics, some suspiciously similar datasheets from two separate Taiwan chip manufacturers, and firmware reverse engineering. Read on if that sounds like fun!
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Starlink review, four months in
SpaceX's Starlink internet service uses satellites in low-earth orbit to provide high-speed Internet to underserved parts of the world, especially places without easy access to cable or fiber. SpaceX's Starlink beta opened up in my area, so I installed Dishy—that's the nickname for the large white satellite dish…
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Investigating an “evil” RJ45 dongle
Reverse-engineering hardware can be difficult -- but sometimes, all you need is a comfy armchair and some Google Translate.
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Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
If you have AirTags in the vicinity of your iPad it drains its battery for no reason. The past months I’ve been wondering why my iPad Pro always needed to be recharged when I used to use it without charging for weeks. I’m not the only one…
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Pressing YubiKeys
If you work in tech, you probably have a YubiKey. I have this one, the YubiKey 5C Nano:
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RePalm
Dmitry.GR: PalmOS on new hardware!
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Windows on Btrfs
So for the past year and a half or so I've been using the fantastic Windows btrfs driver for easily sharing files between my Windows and Linux dualboot. The driver works great and basically fully supports everything that both operating systems could ever want (and let me tell you transparent compression and copy on…
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Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
I think it is healthy to compare historical and modern computing. Let's see how the CPUs contained in recent USB-C wall chargers compare to the power of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC). The Apollo 11 spacecraft carried 3 humans to the moon and back in 1969.
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The AirPods Pro “Rattlegate”
The AirPods Pro “Rattlegate” The first generation of the AirPods was generally regarded as a perfect product. “Apple at its best!” was the universally accepted opinion. I used them for a long time. No speaker issues, no battery issues. Excited for the noise cancelling feature I ordered the AirPods Pro and for the…
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The Framework Desktop is a beast
I've been running the Framework Desktop for a few months here in Copenhagen now. It's an incredible machine. It's completely quiet, even under heavy, stress-all-cores load. It's tiny too, at just 4.5L of volume, especially compared to my old beautiful but bulky North tower running the 7950X — yet it's faster! And…
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Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1
For years, the M1 has only supported OpenGL 4.1. That changes today – with our release of full OpenGL® 4.6 and OpenGL® ES 3.2! Install Fedora for the latest M1/M2-series drivers.