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Macbook charger teardown: surprising complexity inside Apple's power adapter
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 95 posts.
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Can't you just turn up the volume?
When Alex and I were pitching SoundFocus as an app that helped people with hearing loss, this was often…
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Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
If you attempt this project, your classmates will think you're a nerd. You'll likely wind up getting your head flushed and/or balls greased.
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Spraying Magnetic Stripe Cards with Iron Filings
Posted by anaglyph under DIY , Gadgets , Hokum , Science , Skeptical Thinking , WooWoo [80] Comments
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What's New in CPUs Since the 80s and How Does It Affect Programmers?
My mental model of CPUs is stuck in the 1980s: basically boxes that do arithmetic, logic, bit twiddling and shifting, and loading and storing things in memory. I'm vaguely aware of various newer developments like vector instructions (SIMD) and the idea that newer CPUs have support for virtualization (though I have no…
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How I Hacked Amazon’s $5 WiFi Button
UPDATE: I’m now selling ready-to-use buttons at Buttonjoy.com!
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An Apple ISA is coming
Apple is on track to diverge from ARM and x86 to design its own proprietary instruction set. This good for the future of hardware–software co-design.
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CPU Backdoors
It's generally accepted that any piece of software could be compromised with a backdoor. Prominent examples include the Sony/BMG installer , which had a backdoor built-in to allow Sony to keep users from copying the CD, which also allowed malicious third-parties to take over any machine with the software installed…
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NHL goal celebration hack: real-time machine learning and hue light show
This post does a deep dive on the **epic goal celebration hack**. In a single sentence, I trained a machine learning model to detect in real-time that a goal was just scored by the Habs based on the live audio feed of a game and to trigger a light show using Philips hues in my living room.
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Raspberry Pi Zero Hidden in an Xbox Controller
I like to tinker. My wife picked me up the new Raspberry Pi Zero. It's an ultra small and ridiculously cheap computer. How small and cheap? They give it away free on the cover of magazines... Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf you hurry down to WHSmith in Oxford, there are still a few @TheMagP1 copies left.❤️ 3💬 0🔁…
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IBM is still making ThinkPad keyboards
This week I was doing a bit of shopping for an external keyboard for my old Thinkpad x200 laptop. I've grown used to its comfy keyboard and its trackpoint, so I looked on ebay to see if I could find one of the older external USB equivalents.
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Why Intel Added Cache Partitioning
Typical server utilization is between 10% and 50%. Google has demonstrated 90% utilization without impacting latency SLAs . Xkcd estimated that Google owns 2 million machines . If you estimate an amortized total cost of $4k per machine per year , that's $8 billion per year. With numbers like that, even small…
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Storage for Photographers, Part 2
How a 12TB Synology DS415+ NAS changed my digital life: Data is eating me alive. Every gadget these days can shoot photos and record video. I captured 275GB of photos and videos on my last trip. Just one trip! And I'm just a hobbyist photographer with a mere 12MP camera. If you shoot with any regularity and a 20MP+…
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Raspberry Pi Zero vs. Elliott 405
Twitter users @SadHappyAmazing and @HistoricalPics posted yesterday two photographs (copy) showing the Raspberry Pi Zero juxtaposed in front of the Norwich City Council Treasurer's Department building, where the delivery of the Elliott 405 computer was photographed in 1957. Here is how the two computers compare.
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Listening to satellites for $30
I've ever dreamed of space & satellites, it turms out you can received pictures from them.
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Reverse engineering an ancient wireless security keypad using RTL-SDR
A few weeks ago, some friends and I decided that our houses weren’t crammed full enough with useless crap and so we embarked on a journey to a large junk shop surplus warehouse. The place was a vast hangar brimming with old and curious pieces of technology ranging from IBM keyboards to VHS video editing …
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Add a dirt-cheap screen to the Raspberry Pi B+
Recently the internet noticed the Raspberry Pi could drive LCD panels using DPI. This allows very inexpensive displays to be used with basically no additional hardware. In this post we dive into the hardware required, the software configuration, how to read screen datasheets, and basic troubleshooting.
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How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things
New radios that combine miles of range with years of battery life are changing the way we build and use connected devices. Here’s how.
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Motion sensing using the doppler effect
Recently I stumbled upon an interesting paper for implementing motion sensing requiring no special hardware, only a speaker and mic ! Unfortunately the paper didn't include code to test it, so I decided to reproduce it here on the web!
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