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Hardware & Electronics

The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.

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2881

DIY PTP Grandmaster Clock with a Raspberry Pi

tl;dr: I set up an open source Time Pi project to build a stratum 1 PTP and NTP timeserver using a Raspberry Pi. Time is important to modern society, and most of us have a clock on our wrist that's more accurate than at any time in human history. But highly precise time is important in many industries, especially…

2884

Live Streaming a Macintosh Plus

Since recording a handful of C Programming on System 6 videos, I've occasionally wanted to live-stream the more casual daily programming being done on my Macintosh Plus. After getting all of the pieces together, I now have a working self-hosted broadcasting setup.

2885

Homebrew Hercules Graphics Card

After viewing our CGA Redux livestream a friendly tinkerer named Arek contacted me if I was interested in a homebrew Hercules Graphics Card PCB that he designed. Naturally I said yes and assembled the card, playing beta tester for his design. It will probably be open sourced eventually, but is not yet available. So…

2889

Rethinking the Commodore 64 Memory Map (2018)

I've had my head down, programming away on C64 OS, and been making some great progress. I've tweeted a few things out, some of which are revealing of things I've either never talked about here or even seem to contradict what I've said here. So I'd like to take a breather and talk about some of these developments.

2890

The Qweremin

In the summer of 2022 I built a C64-based theremin, described and explained here . The theremin, of course, is one of the oldest electronic instruments. Its main drawback—and strength—is that it's incredibly hard to master. The performer has ultimate control over volume and pitch, but it takes months of practice…

2891

FreeBSD on the Graviton 3

As far as FreeBSD is concerned, Graviton 3 is mostly just a faster version of the Graviton 2: Most things "just work", and the things which don't work on Graviton 2 — hotplug devices and cleanly shutting down an instance via the EC2 API — also don't work on Graviton 3. (Want to help get these fixed? Sponsor my work on…

2893

The Laser Doodler

So I’ve got a project coming up (that may have something to do with this tweet ) that will require a few LED matrix displays. I found a suitable candidate online and ordered one to play around with. Since I already had the display, I thought it’d be fun to run it through the paces and build a little circuit out of it…

2894

Sanyo Triple Five

Even though I seem to have terrible luck with x86-based computers, that doesn’t mean I have to take it lying down. I can go out there and cause even worse things to happen to me. Like, for instance, buying a broken super-budget PC-incompatible from 1982.

2905

Project Mini Rack – compact and portable homelabs

Today I'm announcing Project MINI RACK, an open source project to help those building homelabs, RF/wireless rigs, and other electronics projects into mini 10" racks. Not everyone can afford (either due to budget or space constraints) to have a full 19" rack in their home. Besides that, people may want to deploy small…

2909

Upgrading a motherboard’s BIOS/UEFI (the hard way)

A couple of weeks ago I found a really good deal on a Socket AM4 motherboard that supports the newest AMD Ryzen CPUs. The motherboard is an ASRock A520M/ac . It’s a very basic motherboard which doesn’t appear to be sold by any of the usual retailers anymore, but I couldn’t pass up on the deal, especially with the…