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My Business Card Runs Linux
I’m an embedded systems engineer. I spend a lot of my free time looking for things I could use in future designs, or things that tickle one of my fancies.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 165 posts.
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Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware (2018)
We turned a MacBook into a touchscreen using only $1 of hardware and a little bit of computer vision.
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Thinkpad X210
A couple years ago, I used an old Thinkpad while my MacBook was being repaired. I enjoyed the experience so much that I ended up getting a Thinkpad X62 (an X61 chassis with modern internals). Last S…
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Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices
I recently found some USB devices on eBay (Epiphan VGA2USB LR) that could take VGA as input and present the output as a webcam. Given that I was keen on the idea of not needing to lug out a VGA monitor ever again and there was claimed Linux support I took the risk and bought the whole job lot for about £20 (25 USD).
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Adventures of putting 16 GB of RAM in a motherboard that doesn’t support it
A while ago, I put 16 GB of RAM into one of my computers. The computer is using a Foxconn P55MX motherboard with a Core i5 750. It’s old and could probably be replaced, but it still works for what I need.
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ZedRipper: A 16-core Z80 laptop
Meet the ZedRipper – a 16-core, 83 MHz Z80 powerhouse as portable as it is impractical. The ZedRipper is my latest attempt to build a fun ‘project’ machine, with a couple of goals in mind:
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MacBook Pro Keyboard Drives Me Crazy
The 2018 MacBook Pro Keyboard Drives Me Crazy
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Off-Grid Cyberdeck: Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit
Short, medium, and long form tech projects. Detailed photos and build logs with benefits for paid subscribers.
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Making My Own Glasses
A biohacking health story about making custom glasses after conflicting eye test results from two opticians and an eye doctor for a pilot’s license exam.
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PCI Express on the Raspberry Pi 4
After the daily dose of Hackaday - and with an idea that seemed very doable, and actually, with some improvements can be easily reproducible.
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Open source firmware is important for security
Why open source firmware is important for security.
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Making My Own USB Keyboard from Scratch
A few months ago, I completed a project to build an entire USB keyboard from scratch. This included electronic circuit design, PCB design, firmware coding, CAD design, assembly and usage. The final result is my daily driver work keyboard, which I affectionately call “KeeBee”:
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The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan
December 2020 Update: Lo and behold, the Pi Foundation tacitly acknowledges the Pi needs a fan in the official case, because now they sell the Case Fan! The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pi 4 announcement blog post touted the Pi 4 as providing "PC-like level of performance for most users". The Foundation even offers a…
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HP printers try to send data back to HP about your devices and what you print
Last week my in-laws politely but firmly asked me to set up their new HP printer. I protested that I’m completely clueless about that sort of thing, despite my tax-return-job-title of “software engineer”. Still remonstrating, I was gently bundled into their study with an instruction pamphlet, a cup of tea, a promise…
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New Dell XPS 13 developer edition now available
Last January the Dell XPS 13 developer edition (9370) made its debut. Today we’re excited to announce that one year later its successor, the XPS 13 developer edition (9380), is now available…
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Vendors must start adding physical on/off switches to devices that can spy on us
Update (May 15, 2019): This post was linked and its author quoted as a source in this Fast Company article on the same subject. Where's my webcam's off switch? Have you ever noticed that your webcam doesn't have an "off" switch? I looked on Amazon, and I couldn't find any webcams for sale that
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The 3dfx Voodoo1
This article is the second entry in a series about the "3D cards of the late 90s running Quake". The first entry [1] took a look at the end of 1996 with the Rendition Vérité 1000 and its dedicated port called vQuake. Rendition had managed to beat everybody to Quake-market. For a brief period of time they had the one…
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How to Hack an Expensive Camera
Disclaimer
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Software made me loathe my car
I am the disgruntled owner of a 2015 BMW 320d xDrive. That’s a luxury car, at least to a Dane. And I’m a bit surprised that it’s come to this point. It is, mechanically, a wonderful car. The double-clutch transmission is smooth, it’s easy to drive, the engine is modest, but decent, the milage is great (20 km/l or ~47…
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Lessons from Running a Small-Scale Electronics Factory in My Guest Bedroom
After assembling over 200 Telephreak badges by hand for DEFCON 26 (and taking *way* longer to accomplish it than I estimated) I figured I should document some of the lessons that I learned along the way – from initial design to finished product. The subject of many of the examples of the right way to […]
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A Guide to Recording 660FPS Video on a $6 Raspberry Pi Camera
This article will discuss the setup steps that are required for recording videos at high frame rates on cheap Raspberry Pi cameras. Frame rates up to 660FPS on the V1 camera and up to 1007 on the V2 camera can be achieved. Filming at these extremely high frame rates on a Raspberry Pi is much more challenging and…
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Zen 2 Missives – AMD now delivering efficiencies that are double that of Intel
After languishing through the CPU dark-ages (read: Intel trying real hard to keep people on 4 cores so they could charge an arm and a leg for more), the last two years has seen a vertible tsunami of advances in CPU technologies. AMD's introduction of an 8-core CPU (the 1700X) began the rat-race and with both AMD and…
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Raspberry Pi 4 not working with some chargers
The new pi has been released and it has a USB Type-C connector for power however people are finding some chargers are not working with it (notably macbook chargers). Some have speculated that this is due to a manufacturer limitation on the power supplies however it is actually due to the incorrect detection circuitry…
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iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review
Testing the iPhone 11 Pro as I continue on-going work photographing The Bach Project w/ Yo-Yo Ma, a world tour where Yo-Yo is performing Bach in unconventional places around the globe. It’s been a privilege to photograph this amazing journey.
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Reverse engineering a custom CPU from a single program
or: reverse-engineering a custom, unknown CPU from a single programtl;dr: We reverse-engineered a program written for a completely custom, unknown CPU architecture, without any documentation for th…
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The Nintendo Switch Switch
Yesterday I had the idea that it would be cool if I turned a Nintendo Switch (will be referred to as NX to avoid confusion as NX is the code name for the Nintendo Switch ) console into an actual network switch. I thought about it a bit and realized that it would be doable in hardware at least, since the NX docking…