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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 313 posts.
I’ve been tinkering with arduino-like platforms recently (more on the midi synth soon) and got the idea to make a small message board to leave notes to my girlfriend. This is how I ended up with a simulator, an integration with a demoscene tracker, custom tools to make palette cycling effects, having to learn CAD to…
This is the 3rd post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. I’m the happy owner of a couple of Philips Hue connected lights for a some years. Some of them are colored, some of them regular. In addition, I bought a sensor to go along with the light I installed in my toilets: it turns on automatically when…
The computer built to last 50 years par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
TDOA Sound Localization is determining the source of a sound when all you know is the differences in the time of arrival of the sound event…
A little-known offshoot of the ATmega series of 8-bit microcontrollers is better, faster, and cheaper than its progenitor.
When I look inside a chip from the popular 7400 series, I know what to expect: a fairly simple die, implemented in a straightforward, cost-e...
Dmitry.GR: Creating BTLE-compliant advertisement packets, so that iOS and android devices can see and parse them.
(updated, March 2025) How I Started Caring About Heat Exchanger Masks Back in the 90s I started riding my bike to work after a hiatus of a few years. My coworkers would regularly ask me if I was go…
Last week's article discussed how the Super Nintendo's Video system feeds the TV's CRT. Today I'll summarize what I understand of the hardware generating these graphics.
A comedic example, parked nicely on the thinnest wedge of the venn diagram, is the HamFurs – people who do amateur radio while wearing fur suits. While it isn't my cup of tea, I love that such a group exists. They seemed like nice people when I chatted to them.
I am trying to capture “through the optics” pictures of the AVP, and it is unveiling both interesting information on how the AVP works and the second test pattern I tried “broke&#…
Revision 4 is the new version of the Starlink user terminal. As of February 2024, the new version is only available in the US. I decided to test the new hardware and compare it to the well-known REV3 (a.k.a. Gen2/V2 or “Standard Actuated”).
Initial experiences with the MNT Pocket Reform, primarily the hardware (and tinkering!)
Impressive, but too late to the party
Just as the AGBT hype cycle was firing up (with me contributing multiple sparks), serial entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg's latest sequencing ...
Cores are the new megahertz, at least for enterprise servers. We've gone quickly from 32, to 64, to 80, to 128, and now to 192-cores on a single CPU socket! Amazon built Graviton 4, Google built Axiom, but if you want your own massive Arm server, Ampere's the only game in town. And fastest Arm CPU in the world is…
Last year I thought that we had reached some sort of peak in terms of how far one can go in building useless things by converting a 42U rack into a
This article was supposed to be published all at once on July 30'th. But because of the staggered launch delay into August 8 and 15, some sections of this article were redacted until August 14th.
This article is going to show you how to convert your (existing) wired doorbell (also works for battery-powered chimes) into a smart, WiFi-enabled, doorbell. The essential components needed sets you back about $2, yes, that is correct, just two bucks. No soldering is required and you don’t
This afternoon I received the following email from Arrow, regarding the Snapdragon Developer Kit for Windows: Dear Valued Customer, Please see this important message from Qualcomm: ”At Qualcomm, we are dedicated to pioneering leading technology and delivering premium experiences to our valued customers. The launch of…
Ferroelectric memory (FRAM) is an interesting storage technique that stores bits in a special "ferroelectric" material. Ferroelectric memory...
I am a simple enthusiast attempting to convey my love and enjoyment of radio, electronics, and computing and perhaps to inspire YOU to build something too.
No. But they don’t need to. In preparation for the 5th test flight of Starship, SpaceX announced that they would try to catch the booster using “Mechazilla’s chopsticks.” Later du…
The noise floor is a lot lower in the forest
I needed to log when a light switched on and off during the night as part of debugging an oddly behaving movement sensor. To do that I built...
Programmable NVIDIA GPUs are very inspiring to hardware geeks, proving that processors with an original, incompatible programming model can become widely used.
My wife's alarm clock has been acting up lately. Sporadic at first but then every day, it wouldn't blare in the morning at the set time. Instead, when it was supposed to go off it would... reset itself. The time would start flashing in that "I'm confused because the power went out" sort of way.
The hugely ambitious 'Symbolic Processing Using RISC' project from UC Berkeley
