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Reverse Engineering a Furby
Table of Contents Introduction About the Device Inter-Device Communication Reversing the Android App Reversing the Hardware Dumping the EEPROM Decapping Proprietary Chips SEM Imaging of Decapped Ch…
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
2912
Glitching a microcontroller to unlock the bootloader
Back in the summer I was lucky enough to finagle my boss into letting me take Dmitry Nedospasov ( @nedos )’s hardware hacking training . In it I cut my teeth on using an FPGA to interface with target hardware. After implementing a UART we implemented a module that could parse part of Apple’s OneWire, used to negotiate…
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The marvelous disappearing capacitor
The performance of photodiode amplifiers can be improved in a clever way.
2915
Why Developers don't rush to create apps on new hardware/platforms.
A common fallacy is assuming that any new platform in an exciting market — recently, smartphones and tablet computers — will be flooded with developers as soon as it’s released, as if developers are just waiting outside the gates, hungrily waiting to storm in.
2916
ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook
Up to yesterday, my laptop was a large 15-inch MacBook Pro. It contains an Intel Kaby Lake processor (3.8 GHz). I just got a brand-new 13-inch 2020 MacBook Pro with Apple's M1 ARM chip (3.2 GHz). How do they compare? I like precise data points. Recently, I have been busy benchmarking number parsing routines where you…
2917
The Intel 80376 – A legacy-free i386 with a twist (2010)
25 years after the introduction of the 32 bit Intel i386 CPU, all Intel compatibles still start up (and wake up!) in 16 bit stone-age mode, and they have to be switched into 32/64 bit mode to be usable.
2918
Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
I bought an NVIDIA DGX Spark! It's actually quite a competent general purpose computer while being super tiny and power efficient. It basically just has an ARM CPU, a decent NVIDIA GPU (with the same number of CUDA cores as the RTX 5070), 128 GB of unified memory, and a 4 TB SSD.
2919
Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
The Pixelbook and four other fairly new Chromebooks have the special flag to enable GPU acceleration, making these the first to get the new feature for Linux. This should bring the Android emulator and improved gaming capabilities to Project Crostini.
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Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells
The 13-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro, model MD101LL/A , was launched in 2012 for $1199 . Almost four years later, it’s still for sale , completely unchanged except for a price drop to $1099 in 2013.
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Future instruction set: AVX-512
Software optimization resources | E-mail subscription to this blog | www.agner.org
2925
The Apple-1's shift-register memory
Apple's first product was the Apple-1 computer, introduced exactly 46 years ago, on April 11, 1976. This early microcomputer used an unus...
2926
BliKVM PCIe puts a computer in your computer
This is the BliKVM PCIe, a full computer on a PCI Express card. This is an IP KVM (Internet Protocol Keyboard-Video-Mouse) that can be put inside another computer or server. Most server motherboards already have remote 'lights-out' management functionality built in. Most frequently this is referred to as IPMI…
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Commodore 900
Click the Commodore icon to return. Intending to use pictures or text from this page? Please read this notice . Last modify 11 August 2020.
2928
Optical Mouse Teardown: a look at the sensor
Teardown and analysis of electronics. Integrated circuit design analysis.
2929
Reverse-engineering the 8086's Arithmetic/Logic Unit from die photos
The Intel 8086 processor was introduced in 1978, setting the course of modern computing. While the x86 processor family has supported 64-b...
2930
LLM Falcon 180B Needs 720GB RAM to Run
Yes, if you have enough CPU RAM
2931
Of Sun Ray laptops, MIPS and getting root on them
I like Sun Ray laptops. They make surprisingly useful thin clients. Here, going from right to left, I'm playing Quake on my Solaris UltraBoo...
2932
Pruning spaces from strings quickly on ARM processors
Suppose that I give you a relatively long string and you want to remove all spaces from it. In ASCII, we can define spaces as the space character (' '), and the line ending characters ('\r' and '\n'). I am mostly interested in algorithmic and performance issues, so we can simplify the problem by removing all ……
2933
AVX-512 Mask Registers, Again
Taking a second look at the newly introduced mask registers, this time with the benefit of a SKX die shot from Fritzchens Fritz.
2934
Designing a low-cost high-performance 10 MHz – 15 GHz vector network analyzer
Designing a cheap two-port vector network analyzer with good measurement accuracy.
2935
The Secret Life of Circuits is now in stock everywhere
For the past couple of weeks, you could get my latest book — The Secret Life of Circuits — directly from the publisher.
2936
How transistors really work (1995)
Most technician textbooks do a very poor job of explaining the details of transistors' internal workings. First they assume that the Base current is somehow controlling the Collector current, then they try to explain how one current can affect another. These explanations invariably fail because Bipolar transistors…
2937
Making the most of Apple Silicon power: 2 Core capabilities (2022)
P cores are conventional in that they can deliver excellent performance at maximum frequency, but with high power use. E cores may take 4 times as long for a task, but use less than a third of the …
2938
FareBot: Read data from public transit cards w/ your NFC-equipped Android phone
When it was announced that the Nexus S would have a built-in NFC radio, I immediately started thinking about the potential of using cell phones with RFID public transit fare systems. The day the Gingerbread source code was released, I picked up a Nexus S and began working on a proof-of-concept application that can…
2939
Converting a WW2-Era Landing Gear and Flaps Indicator into a USB Peripheral
The landing gear and flaps indicator, control board stack, and C# .NET Windows Forms app running on the Surface in the background. Everything set for smooth and level flight!
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