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Electronic project kits: hands on with a vintage 160-in-1 (2016)
In this day and age with the bewildering availability of electronics readily available, deciding on a project to embark on can be…
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 313 posts.
242
How Intel Missed the iPhone: The XScale Era
Challenging the conventional narrative on Intel's smartphone miss
243
Unlocking the Duron and Athlon using the pencil (2007)
Unlocking the Duron and Athlon Using the Pencil Introduction The best and most stable way to overclock your Athlon and Duron CPU is ...
244
An accessible one-handed keyboard, inspired by FrogPad
A couple of years ago, I was in an incident that reduced the strength in my left shoulder. I’ve been waiting for an operation to restore the function to that shoulder, but we were warned the post-operative recovery period would be several months. So I started looking for keyboard options...
245
Making Screenshots of Test Equipment Old and New
Last year, I created Fake Parallel Printer , a tool to capture the output of the parallel printer port of old-ish test equipment so that it can be converted into screenshots for blog posts etc.
246
M3 CPU cores have become more versatile
M3 chips widen the gap between Pro and Max variants. They also change relative performance between P and E cores to make M3 CPUs more versatile.
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18 Months with a Framework 13
I've been using a Framework 13 laptop as my main/only computer for a little over 18 months now.
248
Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more...
249
A floppy disk MIDI boombox: The Yamaha MDP-10
Longtime readers of Nicole Express might know that I dabble in playing the organ. But sometimes I want to play with sounds that don’t have the organ’s defini...
250
Inside an IBM/Motorola mainframe controller chip from 1981
In this article, I look inside a chip in the IBM 3274 Control Unit. 1 But before I discuss the chip, I need to give some background on main...
251
Goodwatch – A Ham Radio Wristwatch (2020)
The GoodWatch is my replacement circuit board for Casio’s modern calculator watches, adding support for 70cm and 33cm amateur bands while retaining three years of battery life and most of the watch’s features. It uses the CC430F6147 chip from Texas Instruments, and the watchband forms an untuned random wire antenna…
252
GRC SpinRite
I feel like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with suspect hard drives. I mean, like, back in high school. These days I almost never do, or on the occasion that I have storage trouble, it's a drive that has completely stopped responding at all and there's little to do besides replacing it. One time…
253
The LaserDisc
The first mass market optical media
254
PC Floppy Copy Protection: Softguard Superlok
This is part 2 of a series on PC floppy copy protection methods. You can read Part 1, covering Formaster Copy-Lock here . Softguard System...
255
Japanese Handsaws: The Maebiki Ooga
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…
256
6th generation x86 CPU Comparisons
Paul Hsieh's 6th generation x86 CPU comparision page including K6, P-II and 6x86MX geared towards the high performance software developer audience
257
Hacking eInk Price Tags (2021)
Dmitry.GR: Wireless picture frames that run for years on batteries
258
QMK and Keyboards
A collection of QMK firmware libraries, macros, and thoughts on ergonomic keyboards.
259
Soviet Calculator History (1998)
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…
260
Doom on a modified rotary phone
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.
261
Apple Vision Pro and ADHD
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…
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Implementing Neural Networks on a "10-cent" RISC-V MCU
I have been meaning for a while to establish a setup to implement neural network based algorithms on smaller microcontrollers. After reviewing existing solutions, I felt there is no solution that I…
264
An Apple district manager's Macintosh Portable in 1989-91
A few months ago I introduced you to one of the more notable Apple pre-production units in my collection, a late prototype Macintosh Porta...
265
I made a thing to help you make a thing out of a keypad
I do a lot of electronics projects in my spare time, and I tend to try to make reusable parts to save myself effort in the future. Because I have to order ingredients in certain quantities, I often wind up with more than I need for my project.
266
I Made a Rubbish Clock
With separate plastic, metal, paper, and glass recycling, composting, and pick up of all the rest, knowing which days to put out which bins ...
267
Origami-Inspired Phased Arrays Are Reshaping the Future of Antennas
Folding antennas into different shapes to create near infinite radiation patterns.
268
My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
Photography is arguably my oldest hobby. I’ve loved taking photos for as long as I can remember. I reflected on my first encounter with digital photography in 2003 in a recent post, but I’m old enough…
269
Tips for Building and Deploying Robots
This post is not about research or developing software for robots. Instead it is some tips on how to go about building robots for mass deployment and how to leverage those deployed robots for improving your product.
270
Testing the Z80 Chip with a 1970s Beauty
The Fairchild Sentry 610 was optimized for engineers