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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 296 posts.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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...
In my last post, I showed you to use FireWire on a Raspberry Pi with a PCI Express IEEE 1394 adapter. Now I'll show you how I'm using a new FireWire HAT and a PiSugar3 Plus battery to make a portable MRU, or 'Memory Recording Unit', to replace tape in older FireWire/i.Link/DV cameras. The alternative is an old used…
We traded the physical boundaries of dedicated rooms for the convenience of our always-on digital lives -- but recently I've been building those walls back up.
Back in 2015, I had the idea for gpiozero — a Python library for Raspberry Pi, making programming GPIO devices simpler by abstraction: instead of thinking about pin channels, voltages, pull-up resistors and rising or falling edges, we think about buttons being pressed and released, sensors...
I'm building an 80386-compatible core in SystemVerilog and blogging the process. In the previous post , we looked at how the 386 reuses one barrel shifter for all shift and rotate instructions. This time we move from real mode to protected and talk about protection .
The trend for soldered on RAM in modern laptops is truely evil especially in these current trying times of shortage induced high prices. I normally run 2 laptops, one for personal stuff and one for…
Lately, I’ve been really into 3D printing along with asking myself what we can do with this technology now that it’s become, well, a technology. (At least, in the “this is a thing that can now be used, is robust, and is generally accessible to many people” sense of technology.) The first thing to print on a 3D printer…
Modern processors have the ability to execute many instructions per cycle, on a single core. To be able to execute many instructions per cycle in practice, processors predict branches. I have made the point over the years that modern CPUs have an incredible ability to predict branches. It makes benchmarking difficult…
I have recently been working on tuning circuits, which typically consist of an inductor and a capacitor (i.e. an LC circuit). For those not familiar with inductors, they are passive components that store energy in a magnetic field. They oppose changes in current, meaning that they pass direct current (DC) and block…
round 2: rooting & analysing firmware of the TP-Link TL-WR841N
Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle, providing lab space for astronauts and exper...
Emulating the unknown: Controlling Sewing Machines with a Game Boy
The Nintendo Entertainment System. Is it the platonic ideal of an 8-bit video game system? Well, only because it’s so prominent and successful– it’s actually...
A celebration into the IBM PC, the Model F/XT keyboard, where it came from and what it became
We owe computers not to Charles Babbage, but to the invention of electronically-controlled working memory.
A story of sharp edges, segfaults, and standards
After learning Apple killed off FireWire (IEEE 1394) support in macOS 26 Tahoe, I started looking at alternatives for old FireWire equipment like hard drives, DV cameras, and A/V gear. I own an old Canon GL1 camera, with a 'DV' port. I could plug that into an old Mac (like the dual G4 MDD above) with FireWire—or even…
Pooya Esfandiar's Home Page
The FPGA 386 core I've been building now boots DOS, runs applications like Norton Commander, and plays games like Doom. On DE10-Nano it currently runs at 75 MHz. With the core now far enough along to run real software, this seems like a good point to step back and look at one of the 80386's performance-critical…
mattst88's blog - Reverse Engineering the PROM for the SGI O2
Capacitor vendors don't want you to know this! Save money on capacitors by spending more on other components
About a eight weeks ago I had virtually no interest in calculators. Blank, dull, tedious-looking objects that remind me of long, arduous rainy afternoons in 1980’s/1990’s school maths classes.
In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor ...
This is a PCMCIA development board for retro-computing enthusiasts who want to experiment with audio, networking, and expansion on vintage laptops and mobile devices. While ISA users have enjoyed projects like PicoGUS and PicoMEM, PCMCIA users have long been limited to scarce legacy cards with narrow functionality …
How to move fast when building for the physical world
Published: 01-08-2026 20:08 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
