2851
USB-C done cheap: when 2 ports become 1 (2020)
How PC hardware is implementing USB-C in a way that may or may not violate standards.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
2852
Real-Time Touch Controller for the Yamaha DX7 Synthesizer
George Barlow initially set out to develop a controller to be able to call up a voice preset, and then tweak from there. What he's done is essentially transformed the DX7 synth into an interactive sound designer's dream machine.
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2854
Turning my ESP32 into a DNS sinkhole to fight doomscrolling
A fun project that I learned a lot from.
2855
$5 whale listening hydrophone making workshop
Whale songs were first noticed by accident, when analysts tracking Russian submarines at the height of the cold war heard cetacean interference instead. An engineer sent some recordings to Roger Payne, a biologist friend of his, who did something that proved pivotal: he played the hours-long recordings on his hi-fi at…
2856
AT&T's Hobbit Microprocessor (2023)
An unexpected journey for AT&T with it's own low power processor
2857
2858
Vetinari's Clock (2011)
In the excellent Discworld series the character Lord Vetinari has a clock in his waiting room which is designed to tick irregularly in order to make his visitor feel ill at ease. Inspired by a post featured on Hackaday I decided to build my own version of this clock with a simple and easy to make design.
2859
A PCB business card with a batteryless LED, powered by the phone that taps it
I made a circuit-board business card that opens my website and lights an LED with power harvested from the phone tapping it.
2860
2861
Reverse-engineering an airspeed/Mach indicator from 1977
How does a vintage airspeed indicator work? CuriousMarc picked one up for a project, but it didn't have any documentation, so I reverse-en...
2862
WLW: 700 kHz, 500 kW, 100% modulation, no limiter (2000)
Radios with cooling ponds.
2863
2864
33C3 talk on dissecting cellular modems
Yesterday, together with Holger 'zecke' Freyther, I co-presented at 33C3 about Dissectiong modern (3G/4G) cellular modems. This presentation covers some of our recent explorations into a specific type
2865
FPGA-Based Disk Controller for the Apple II (2017)
Apple II disk controller cards are weird, there are a crazy number of different types , and many are rare and expensive. Can an FPGA-based solution save the day for retro collectors? You bet! Nearly all the existing disk controllers connect the same 8-bit bus to the same 19-pin disk interface, so a universal clone is…
2866
Reverse engineering a Hit Clip (2013)
It’s hard to see a child outside today without some kind of iDevice pumping high fidelity 192kbps stereo lossless audio into their shiny white headphones, but BACK IN MY DAY, the iPod hadn’t been invented yet. Pickings were slim. Walkmen were outdated, CD players were pricey and would skip if bumped around despite…
2867
Train Simulator Controller
From January to July 2026, I have continued to work on my UK Class 800-inspired train simulator. There are a number of components in progress, but few newly completed: in lieu of posts about completed portions of the simulator, here’s a roundup of progress across the different hardware aspects of the project.
2868
Got my ultimate retro KVM setup working
By Ruben Schade in Eora/Sydney, Australia.
2869
Learning Bluetooth Hackery with BLE CTF
Do you want to get into tinkering and hacking Bluetooth LE devices? Up until now, doing so was very much a DIY process. You would h...
2870
The MacBook Air: A Decade’s Worth of Legacy
A decade ago, we entered the current era of notebook design when Steve Jobs pulled the future out of an envelope.
2871
Reviewing Bad Schematics as EE Interview Tactic
help your EE candidates strut their stuff
2872
Wasp Blower
Departing wasps always take flight from the small crack under the door sill
2873
The PalmOS powered wristwatch from Fossil
Imagine a smartwatch you could load any PalmOS app you wanted onto. We had that... about 20 years ago.
2874
RISC instruction sets I have known and disliked
Experienced professional software engineer based in York, UK
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2876
Is the Mill CPU real? (2014)
I’ve seen the Mill CPU come up a number of times — maybe because I subscribed to their updates and so I get emails about their talks. They’re getting a bunch of buzz, but every t…
2877
Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
Benchmarking World of Warcraft performance when running native and emulated on Windows on ARM.
2878
Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1
The Minisforum MS-R1 uses the same Cix CD8180 Arm SoC as the Orion O6 I reviewed earlier this year. But everything else about this thing is different. What this thing should be, is a box that runs Linux and can compete with at least an Apple M1 Mac mini, or a mid-range Mini PC. But what we got... is something…
2879
IBM paperweight teardown: Reverse-engineering 1970s memory chips
I recently received a vintage IBM paperweight from the early 1970s that showcases some memory chips. 1 When IBM started using integrated ...
2880
This Old SGI: notes and memoirs on the Silicon Graphics 4D series (1996)
I am posting this assortment of notes and observations as a kind of "thank you" to the numerous people who have replied to my posts in the past. The free flow of information is the life-blood of the internet community, and this is my feeble attempt to maintain that flow, while at the same time repaying the kindness…