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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
In 2004 I built the first AppleCrate , an 8-board system, as an inexpensive, easy to program vehicle for experiments in parallel programming�a kind of "blade server" for the Apple II, if you will! AppleCrate I (at the time I didn't realize that it was number "I" ;-) was great fun, and it enabled some very interesting…
From OP 2230, "Workmanship and Design Practices for Electronic Equipment" , published by the direction of the chief of the Bureau of Naval Weapons , 1 December, 1962. pp. 7-9 --- 7-14.
EDIT - the original article has an image of the PCB with the floppy power connector mounted the WRONG WAY. This is the INCORRECT WAY. Do NO...
As I was debugging a wireless mouse based on a 2.4 GHz proprietary protocol, I wanted to detect the transmitted signals. Note that I purposefully wrote “detect”: It was sufficient to see how often the transmission occurred (and if at all) and whether the link was unidirectional – i.e., only the mouse transmits and the…
To kick off MARCHintosh, I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico: This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040). The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a…
To test if a display interface works we often don't want to use a huge framework like GTK or Qt. This article shows an easy way on how we can use a framebuffer directly on a DRM graphics driver under Linux.
daverowntree has one repository available. Follow their code on GitHub.
How I enabled the PowerVR GPU on the TH1520 SoC by writing the missing kernel drivers.
Because your $5 microcontroller needed to run UNIX
RISC-V is currently quite slow compared to modern CPUs in 2024.
The Advantage360 Professional is the successor to the well-known Advantage2. It comes with several new features, such as Adjustable Split, Wireless connection, Tenting, ZMK (highly customizable firmware), and many other minor things. In this blog post, I will explain the significant design changes and my experiences…
At the end of 2019, I traded in my two-year-old 15-inch MacBook Pro, sold off some older Apple gear (an iPad and older iPhones), and decided to spring for one of the newer 16-inch laptops. I had us…
I’m not a POWER (or recently: Power) expert, only an enthusiastic user and advocate. Still, in the past couple of weeks a number of people from around the world asked my opinion how the POWER architecture could be kept relevant. This blog is really just an opinion, as I do not have the financial means to go ahead. It…
This led to some general discussion that this particular device really is in a class of devices, now called the "killers", which need to be made.
The Pine Time is a $27 smart watch that runs open source firmware. I’ve had one sitting in the back of a drawer for a...
Back in January, the ThunderScope team sent me a PCIe card version of their prototype open hardware oscilloscope.
When I was young I owned a PlayStation 1 (PS1). It was one of the first, if not the first, game consoles I owned and it had a profound effect on my future. I can trace the history of how I got involved in computers back to playing and modding
Iran’s new military satellite, NOUR 01, most interesting fact may not be that it resembles a college engineering experiment but rather that it may have a connection to a Mexican military payl…
The PowerBook 1400 is, and remains, my favourite laptop. It was everything the PowerBook 5300 should have been and more. It was my first l...
A while back I wrote an analysis of fake microSD cards. As a result of the post, I’ve received this question regularly via email:
Dmitry.GR: Creating BTLE-compliant advertisement packets, so that iOS and android devices can see and parse them.
I have just released a serial port based Amiga disk and file transfer tool, amigaXfer .
In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors,...
In this post, I’ll explain how I compiled an OCaml program to run on a TI-84+ CE calculator. 🐪
Personal preference is an interesting thing. People can have a particular preference for something until they are able to experience something else. As we gain experience, our personal preference gets more finely tuned.
Buying a new monitor is stressful because there's so many things to understand. After reading this article, you will know what to look for.
This post is going to be a bit different from my usual posts. It’s still about computers, but it’s about a different type of computer: the computer modules in my 2009 Dodge Ram 1500 pickup. Vehicles these days have lots of computers in them. I’ve historically been afraid to mess too much with them in fear of screwing…
