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Soyuz spacecraft digital clock teardown
We recently obtained a clock that flew on a Soyuz space mission. 1 The clock, manufactured in 1984, is much more complex inside than you'd ...
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 243 posts.
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Graviton2 and Graviton3
What do modern cloud workloads look like? And what does that have to do with new chip designs? I found these gems in Peter DeSantis's ReInve...
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Amazon Echo Flex Teardown: The Big Silicon
Teardown and analysis of electronics. Integrated circuit design analysis.
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VNC client running on a coffee machine
Published: 08-04-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
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What ever happened to scandium bike frames? (2016)
Blog about bikes and cycling from an industry insider
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Getting the best out of OpenSCAD
A write-up of how I use OpenSCAD to produce designs for manufacturing, and how I post-process the output to get the best results.
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Reverse-engineering an unusual IBM modem board from 1965
The vintage IBM circuit board below has a large metal block on it that caught my attention, so I investigated it in detail. It turns out t...
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A Pixel Purse LED Cube Controlled by a Cisco 3G Modem
I presented this project at BangBangCon West 2020, but never got around to publish a blog post about it. A 10 minute talk is not enough to cover some technical aspects, and since I’m starting to forget them, it’s about time to write things down.
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Raspberry Pi Floppy Controller Board
If there’s one criticism I hear more often than any other about the pi, it’s “ I wish my Raspberry Pi had a floppy drive “. It’s really shocking that the pi doesn’t have the ubiquitous 34-pin floppy header that we all know and love. How else are you supposed to interface your Tandon TM100-2A or your Teac FD-55BR or…
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PiDP-11 – Recreating PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi
The PiDP-11 is a modern replica of Digital Equipment Corporation’s influential PDP-11 minicomputer. Before, we had a computer on every desk and in every home–and long before they were in every pocket–computers were large, intimidating, and locked in special rooms at universities and corporations. The PDP series paved…
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I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes
Hello there, I'm betting that you need a break from curve flattening, and disinfectants, and Twitter, and Slack, and Zoom, and asking if people can see your...
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Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
Since the Compute Module 4 came along last year, there have been a few projects that use it that make me do a double-take: They did what with a Pi? Alftel's Seaberry is a carrier board for the CM4 in the Mini ITX form factor that adds on eleven PCI Express slots: 1 x16 slot (with x1 lane) in the standard ITX location…
224
Eyeway's Retina-Tracking Foveated Display
Introduction This article is part 3 on EyeWay Vision’s (EyeWay) foveated laser scanning display and follows up on Part 1 that discussed the technology, and Part 2 that showed through-the-opti…
225
Bootstrapping an Amiga without a bootable floppy
I have just released a serial port based Amiga disk and file transfer tool, amigaXfer .
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Sony News Portable Workstation NWS-1250 (2020)
We do not see many vintage Japanese workstations in the West. We also do not see many portable workstations (of any make). So, what we really rarely see, are Japanese portable workstations. I feel …
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Pump up the charge: Getting -5V from a 5V power supply
When it comes to electronics, I am a woman of simple interests. Ideally, I only want to care about one voltage, and ground– there’s a reason I did so much be...
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Adventures using and repairing an X131e laptop from 2011
This article covers several repairs, one including reverse engineering the BIOS to allow replacement parts. Feel free to scroll down and skip to this content.
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Booting the IBM 1401: How a 1959 punch-card computer loads a program
How do you boot a computer from punch cards when the computer has no operating system and no ROM? To make things worse, this computer req...
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Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
Just recently, there was a surge in traffic to my old legacy dial-up sounds pages. While I did my best with the equipment I had at the time to capture the sound of dial-up modems, I always knew tha…
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Pine64 and Radxa's new Pi CM4-compatible boards
Since the Raspberry Pi was introduced, hundreds of clones have adopted the Pi's form factor (from the diminutive Zero to the 'full size' model B). Often they have better hardware specs, and yet they remain a more obscure also-ran in that generation of Single Board Computer (SBC). So when I saw Radxa's CM3 and Pine64's…
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Tanaka Hisashige, builder of the Myriad Year Clock (2016)
Japan's greatest inventor whose life span a formative period in the nation's history, Tanaka Hisashige built the Myriad Year Clock, a 1000-part masterpiece that's today a national treasure.
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IBM paperweight teardown: Reverse-engineering 1970s memory chips
I recently received a vintage IBM paperweight from the early 1970s that showcases some memory chips. 1 When IBM started using integrated ...
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Go the F to Sleep
· hackintosh · opencore · sleep · wake · acpi · Oct 23, 2021 by Aleksandar Vacić 6 minute read
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Upgrading a motherboard’s BIOS/UEFI (the hard way)
A couple of weeks ago I found a really good deal on a Socket AM4 motherboard that supports the newest AMD Ryzen CPUs. The motherboard is an ASRock A520M/ac . It’s a very basic motherboard which doesn’t appear to be sold by any of the usual retailers anymore, but I couldn’t pass up on the deal, especially with the…
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A look at power on the new M1 Max
The ramblings and experiments of a software engineer and tech enthusiast based in Dublin.
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The Connection Machines CM-1 and CM-2 (2015)
Thirty years after its launch in 1987, a CM-2 was acquired by MoMA NY. It is only on display in selected shows - its inaugural exhibit was in " Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-1989"
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Rethinking software testing: perspectives from the world of hardware (2019)
The conventional view of Software Testing The hardware and software worlds may seem poles apart, and in many ways, they indeed are. But there’s a wealth of knowledge that each can learn from the ot…