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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
I have tested the XIAO ePaper DIY Kit (ESP32-S3) – EE04 from Seeed Studio in depth. While its 6-color Spectra 6 display is impressive out of the box, I wanted to see if software could overcome hardware limitations. In this post, I’ll share how I’ve pushed this hardware to its limits by using dithering techniques to…
The ARM powered Thinkpad x13s is the first truly premium Windows on ARM laptop. Let's see how that actually stacks up as a software engineer!
I noticed a "bug" in the way Audi handles its Cruise Control options. Cruise control is only meant to be used once you drive "30 kilometers per hour or more". …
Is exFAT as fragile as some say?
Windows XP I have a lot of fond memories of Windows XP and after feeling nostalgic, I was happy to find out that it’s relatively easy to take it for a spin on an ARM64 Mac using QEMU. I decided to install XP and an assortment of classic software one final time, taking screenshots of the whole process. This included…
A sourced history of ThinkPad from IBM's 1992 700C to Lenovo's 2026 AI workstations: TrackPoint, keyboards, X-series, T-series and P-series.
I wrote a short program to generate the Mandelbrot set on the Xerox Alto, a groundbreaking minicomputer from the 1970s. The program, in...
This article describes how to write C programs for the BeagleBone's microcontrollers. The BeagleBone Black is an inexpensive, credit-card...
Nike computer - Installed in class room, not BC van. From Rolf Goerigk Left rack has the power supplies - outputs about 7 different voltages. Top panel is switches, meters, voltage warning lights. (Note: in the van installation, this rack is on the right side of the computer.) Middle two racks - operational amplifies…
With Computex, there’s been a ton of news about Ice Lake (hereafter ICL) and the Sunny Cove core (SNC). Wikichip, Extremetech and Anandtech among many others have coverage (and there will be …
The solar kiln is based on the well know Virginia Tech design, adapted for my own needs and materials I could find easily on local hardware stores. Mine is a small one, with a gross storage space inside of about 1.5 m in length, 0.85 m wide and 0.65 high (~5’ x 2.75’ x 2’ ).
Can you run a 8086 PC-XT emulation with 640K RAM, 80×25 CGA composite video and a 1.44MB MS-DOS disk on a ESP12E without additional components? Yes, you can and I did. The CPU emulator is a po…
Writing Hello World on a homebrew CPU
First, what is an ASIC? An ASIC is an Application Specific Integrated Circuit which basically means that it is an Integrated Circuit on a single piece of silicon and its use is limited to a particu…
Sound Lab is an analogue synthesiser, consisting of six modules that can be combined in a variety of ways. It uses a single printed circuit board that doubles as the front panel and wiring, with surface-mount components and PCB-mounted controls to make the construction as easy as possible:
Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a 32-bit processor but also switching to a...
In my previous blog post I talked about how I bought a Blu-ray drive and a couple of M-Discs to use it for long-term archival backups.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Since the Compute Module 4 came along last year, there have been a few projects that use it that make me do a double-take: They did what with a Pi? Alftel's Seaberry is a carrier board for the CM4 in the Mini ITX form factor that adds on eleven PCI Express slots: 1 x16 slot (with x1 lane) in the standard ITX location…
That’s VME as in Virtual-8086 Mode Enhancements, introduced in the Intel Pentium Processor, and initially documented in the infamous NDA-only Appendix H.
You might think that Apple, Commodore or perhaps Radio Shack made the first personal computer, but you’d be wrong.
The Pixel 8 hardware ( Tensor G3 ) supports the ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) , and software support is available both in Android userspace and the Linux kernel. This feature is a powerful defense against linear buffer overflows and many types of use-after-free flaws. I’m extremely happy to see this hardware…
Much of modern Apple’s design philosophy is to relentlessly strip down most products to the bare minimum in certain areas as technological progress allows, following (and largely defining) the modern design fashion of nearly-unquestioned devotion to minimalism.
This post describes how we repaired the monitor from a Xerox Alto. The Alto was a revolutionary computer, designed in 1973 at Xerox PARC ...
Let's look at this little gizmo Sony produced in the early 1990s.
Introduction This article is part 3 on EyeWay Vision’s (EyeWay) foveated laser scanning display and follows up on Part 1 that discussed the technology, and Part 2 that showed through-the-opti…
