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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
When learning a new programming language, I like having a well defined yet non-trivial problem to solve. Conway’s Game of Life (GoL) fits this definition. It has enough depth to uncover various tradeoffs. So naturally, when I picked up Chisel hardware description language (HDL), I wanted to build Game of Life in FPGA…
Zigfrid is the end result of my RFID tinkering. Since I will most definitely forget most things described here in the (very) near future, I share this for those few who might find it interesting. P…
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…
Extreme refurbishing of a Commodore SX-64 keyboard. Lots of putty, epoxy resin and spray painting with original color and more :)
Update: Just to clarify, this post is speculation, not fact. Based on the excellent iFixit teardowns it looks like the iPad 2 headphone jack has pins on both sides , which is more in line with Apple's typical cantilever design (roughly similar to the jack in the Macbook Air ). Interestingly, it looks like the…
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…
I bought Avnet's $49 Spartan 3A development board but it was discontinued not long afterward - right about the time when I decided I needed a few dozen more. I've since done some extensive research (thanks, Google!) to find a comparable thrifty thrill.
Fourteen years ago I noted that disk drives were growing so fast I couldn’t fill them up. Between 1997 and 2002, storage capacity doubled every year, allowing me to replace a 3 gigabyte drive with a new 120 gigabyte model. I wrote:
As the eleventh hour dawns all the pieces start to fall into place. I lived my life knowing this would happen, yet when it is I may be just as unprepared as anyone else. As any self driving car maker knows, predicting doesn’t mean you can act.
tl;dr: The ODROID-C2 is a very solid competitor to the Raspberry Pi model 3 B, and is anywhere from 2-10x faster than the Pi 3, depending on the operation. The software and community support is nowhere near what you get with the Raspberry Pi, but it's the best I've seen of all the Raspberry Pi clones I've tried. The…
Earlier today I did a livestream on my YouTube channel to attempt using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. As with all my testing, I'm documenting everything I learn in this GitHub issue, which is part of the Raspberry Pi PCI Express Card Database website. It's only been a few hours, but…
These pages contain a fairly brief technical history of Acorn Computers. I have decided to focus on the technology because that is where my interests lie. Only very major non-technical events in Acorn's history have been included. If anyone finds any inaccuracies in the following pages please contact me using the link…
All this work was done in November last year. I haven’t worked on it since, but others have shown interest in picking this up, so it’s about time this gets thrown out in the open.
The groundbreaking 8086 microprocessor was introduced by Intel in 1978 and led to the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and se...
A famous blockprint by Hokusai titled “Mount Fuji Seen from the Mountains of Totomi,” showing a crew of sawyers rip-sawing a timber into boards using maebiki ooga saws, one man on top a…
Eric Park's website
Paul Hsieh's 6th generation x86 CPU comparision page including K6, P-II and 6x86MX geared towards the high performance software developer audience
While programmers today take division for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — division required a sl...
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer 1 , the computer that provided guidance, navigation, and control onboard the Apollo flight...
Dmitry.GR: Wireless picture frames that run for years on batteries
2020 has been a weird year, for everyone around the world. In my specific case, that meant being away from my home in Shanghai, as we were in Europe at the time Covid hit and China did not make it easy to return until somewhere towards the end of the year.
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...
How many problem domains require wrapping signed integers or non-wrapping unsigned integers? Can the current undefined case be replaced with a trap and everything else be left intact?
A collection of QMK firmware libraries, macros, and thoughts on ergonomic keyboards.
