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Hardware & Electronics

The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 313 posts.

2024
3

Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

Forcing customers to replace an entire system just because the cheapest component failed might be really profitable, I have no idea… But I do know that it annoyed me enough to make me want to fix it myself. While I understand that what I do next is beyond a large number of Advantage Air customers, in my investigation…

8

Jailbreaking RabbitOS

Critics unanimously agree that it sucks , and some have accused the company of deliberate deception . Rabbit Inc. reportedly accepts returns, but customers are so eager to get rid of their R1s that even new-in-box units are selling for well below RRP ($200) on secondary markets.

13

MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

This all started from a conversation about the RP2040 MCU, and building a simple desktop/GUI for it. I’d made a comment along the lines of “or, just run some old OS”, and it got me thinking about the original Macintosh .

17

I like the RP2040

The RP2040 is a microcontroller made by Raspberry Pi. Unlike their more widely known products, the RP2040 is meant to be embedded in consumer electronics. It's cheap and available in tens of thousands for immediate dispatch from your local Mouser.

21

Phased Array Microphone (2023)

A 192-channel phased array microphone, with FPGA data acquisition and beamforming/visualization on the GPU. Phased arrays allow for applications not possible with traditional directional microphones, as the directionality can be changed instantly, after the recording is made, or even be focused at hundreds of…

24

Intel's Humbling

Intel under Pat Gelsinger is reaping the disaster that came from a lack of investment and execution a decade ago; the company, though, appears to be headed in the right direction, as evidenced by i…

25

M4 Mac mini's efficiency

I had to pause some of my work getting a current-gen AMD graphics card running on the Pi 5 and testing a 192-core AmpereOne server to quickly post on the M4's efficiency. I expected M4 to be better than M1/M2 (I haven't personally tested M3), and I hoped it would at least match the previous total-system-power…

29

Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

One of the remarkable characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips. If we open and look at the PCBs, we can find inside things like the CIC copy protection chip, SRAM, and even "enhancement processors".