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Tracing the roots of the 8086 instruction set to the Datapoint 2200 minicomputer
The Intel 8086 processor started the x86 architecture that is still extensively used today. The 8086 has some quirky characteristics: it i...
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 294 posts.
212
A DX7 USB Dongle
The amazing Rene Stange added USB Gadget (i.e. device) support to the Circle bare metal Raspberry Pi environment a while ago so I’ve now incorporated that into MiniDexed. This allows MiniDexe…
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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.
215
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...
216
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…
217
Building a Frankenstein 64
👶 From when Mosaic took over Gopher. 🏢 VP of Engineering @ Cloudflare 🕹️ Slightly addicted to retrocomputing 🔍 Hit Ctrl-K to Search
218
Physical Knobs and Elixir
I like production gear. Audio, video and .. miscellaneous. I like things that seem like they'll make me oh-so-very productive. I'm a sucker prosumer as a hobby. Let's talk about Elgato, Elixir and why I never actually get anything done. This is unfortunately not sponsored by a prosumer brand, or anyone, that'd have…
219
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.
220
Hilbert Transform
Concise summary of the Hilbert transform: mathematics, effects on signals, and applications in telecommunications.
221
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...
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Emulating an iPod Touch 2G using QEMU
My personal website.
224
Hardware trojans under a microscope (2022)
Table of Contents
225
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…
226
Infra-Red, in Situ (Iris) Inspection of Silicon
Cryptography tells us how to make a chain of trust rooted in special-purpose chips known as secure elements. But how do we come to trust our secure elements? I have been searching for solutions to this thorny supply chain problem . Ideally, one can directly inspect the construction of a chip, but any viable inspection…
227
The quest for a simple smartwatch
My trusty old smartwatch recently stopped working. It was a Garmin Vivomove HR, a minimal hybrid watch with regular watch hands and a tiny hidden screen that showed notifications and messages. It served me well for quite some time but unfortunately the hidden screen has stopped working and it would cost me as much to…
228
Inside the 8086 processor's instruction prefetch circuitry
The groundbreaking 8086 microprocessor was introduced by Intel in 1978 and led to the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and se...
229
Reverse-engineering the division microcode in the Intel 8086 processor
While programmers today take division for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — division required a sl...
230
Reverse-engineering the 8086 processor's address and data pin circuits
The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) started the x86 architecture that continues to this day. In this blog post, I'm focusing on a small p...
231
The complex history of the Intel i960 RISC processor
The Intel i960 was a remarkable 32-bit processor of the 1990s with a confusing set of versions. Although it is now mostly forgotten (outs...
232
RISC-V Business: Testing StarFive's VisionFive 2 SBC
It's risky business fighting Intel, AMD, and Arm, and that's exactly what Star Five is trying to do with this: The chip on this new single board computer could be the start of a computing revolution—at least that's what some people think! The VisionFive 2 has a JH7110 SoC on it, sporting a new Instruction Set…
233
Homelab analog telephone exchange
An introduction to my MCU based fully featured analog telephone exchange, how I mounted it in my home lab powered with batteries for months of use
234
SolarPi experiment 2: Finally something that works
After more than a year, I finally got to the point where I have more or less 24/7 solar-powered Raspberry Pi microserver.
235
Building Alex Taradov’s open-source USB sniffer
A couple of months ago I stumbled upon a post on Hackaday about an inexpensive open-source USB 2.0 sniffer created by Alex Taradov . This is a really cool project! Normally, USB sniffers like this can cost thousands of dollars, especially if you’re paying for fancy protocol decoding and also want high-speed 480 Mbps…
236
IBM PC 8088 replaced with a Motorola 68000
I was wondering what the IBM Personal Computer would have been like if they had chosen the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8088, so I used my MCL86+ to emulate the 68000 and find out! The MCL86…
237
Why TinyML is still so hard to get excited about
This week, I went to the tinyML Summit in Burlingame, Calif. TinyML, or running small machine learning models on constrained devices, is one of the most exciting technologies I’ve encountered. But it’s also the one most likely to put people to sleep when I talk about it. Using local computing to handle object or even…
238
The i.MX8 cannot be deblobbed
Devices based on the i.MX8 or i.MX8M (such as the Librem phone or MNT Reform) have received popular coverage recently. The number of firmware blobs involved in the bringup of these devices is often a point of discussion. At times, people have considered whether some of these blobs could be replaced with libre…
239
Fitting 44% More Data on a C64/1541 Floppy Disk
The physical data format on a Commodore 1541 5¼-inch floppy disk as used by the C64 is completely defined in software. The drive’s operating system fits 170 KB on a disk. This article explores different strategies, each with its pros and cons, to fit up to 246 KB.
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Welding and the automation frontier
The big question about Artificial Intelligence, other than whether it will destroy human civilization, is the effect it will have on employment.