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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
I’ve always wanted an ARM server in my homelab. But earlier, I either had to use an underpowered ARM system, or use Asahi which not only requires expensive Mac hardware but also slowed down in the past few years.
blog about networking, cameras, old gear, and xmpp
Back in April of last year, the speedometer failed in my ‘94 Explorer. Rather than hunting down a replacement cable and tearing apart the dash just to restore an old analog needle, I opted to build a digital replacement using a Raspberry Pi and GPS.
Examining the extent of AVX related downclocking on Intel’s Ice Lake CPU
People are moving away from corporate controlled tech, and making their own. How the designs of cyberdecks are being driven by women. And how medieval guilds, Luddites, and the Arts and Crafts movement are all connected to our current moment.
The first mechanical device used in Russia for computational purposes was the Russian abacus ( schoty ). This device became "the national calculator" and was used in cashier's offices down to the middle of the 90's. It is interesting to note that the textbook "Trade calculations" published in 1986 devotes a whole…
The 8-bit Z-80 processor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and it is s...
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...
System76 built their first workstation-class Arm PC, the Thelio Astra, and it's marketed for streamlined autonomous vehicle development. But I'm not an automotive developer, just someone who enjoys Linux, Arm, and computing. So I was excited to spend a few weeks (which turned into a few months) testing the latest…
Almost every smartphone uses a processor based on the ARM1 chip created in 1985. The Visual ARM1 simulator shows what happens inside the...
First, let me go on the record as saying I'm a huge Raspberry Pi fan. If you ...
Investigating some details of SIMD related frequency transitions on Intel CPUs.
The Intel 4004 after 44 years: scalable vector mask artwork, Rubylith cutters, replica PCB rev 2, printer emulator code.
If you haven't read my Nintendo 3DS intro blog post first, I'd suggest it as it's a fun short read that gives some backstory of my interest...
Doom Phone is a rotary phone that has been repurposed to control the classic first-person shooter game Doom via Bluetooth. We built it in two days during the "Internet Of Shit" hackathon organized by Technarium crew in Vilnius, Lithuania.
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…
Stick microphone out window, catch chorps, feel joy.
I’ve recently been working on a mechatronics project that involves constructing an X-Y cartesian motion system. I opted to use stepper motors to drive each axis, and timing belts and pulleys for translating the rotational torque of the steppers into linear motion. The timing belts need to be anchored to the component…
Running Minicomputer Software
The design of the camera body evolved from a simplified massing of functional elements to refinements based on ergonomics and scale, as I learned more about the strength of the material.
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
G64 files are C64/1541 disk images that contain all bits as they are physically laid out on the 5¼-inch floppy disk. Let’s visualize them! This animation shows 28 regular Commodore 1541 disks. Track 1 contains 21 sectors. Every sector is prefixed by two small red areas: These are the SYNC marks.…
I hope you're not tired of the 8087, because I have another article about Intel's floating-point chip. 1 In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087...
I took a spare ThinkPad T430 and put all my home server workloads on it. Here's how it went.
I'm currently typing this blog post in a floating window in the middle of snow-covered Yosemite. I am a floating body manifested into the transcendental Tim Cook matrix. I look into the sky and follow the soft clouds as they pass overhead. They slowly part, revealing Steve Jobs' smiling face watching over me from the…
A couple of days back, Ganesh Venkataramanan, leader of the Tesla Dojo project, announced the Dojo machine learning training system. It’s an unusually network rich, power dense, and memory light design. I’ve summarized the architecture of the system below but I found three aspects of the system particularly…
After more than a year, I finally got to the point where I have more or less 24/7 solar-powered Raspberry Pi microserver.
