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I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard
Over the past decade, I've worked to build the perfect family dashboard system for our home, called Timeframe:
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 296 posts.
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Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid
Modern cars are computers on wheels that send home nonstop telemetry about you. In this post I remove my 2024 RAV4 Hybrid's modem and GPS to prevent that :)
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Android may soon restrict on-device ADB
Changes proposed for ADB could kill an entire ecosystem of open-source power-user apps, mobile developer setups, and rootless privacy tools based on Shizuku.
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Running Tesla Model 3's computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars
David Schütz's bug bounty writeups
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Jailbreaking my car's navigation system just so I can change the time
I shouldn't have to be doing any of this, but at least it's fun.
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The coolest use for the Vision Pro
One day there will hopefully be a house on this land Over the last year, I admittedly haven’t used my Vision Pro a ton, but fairly recently I discovered a super handy use that it’s absolutely incredible at, provided you have the right tools. After years of apartment life my girlfriend and I have recently begun the…
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Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
Building in consumer hardware as a software engineer
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Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
Speaking of being on the internet and finding things that make you go, “Hey! It’s not just me!” I scrolled across this skeet from Tyler Gaw : I just dug to the…
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There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's emp...
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QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall
The QuadRF (pictured above) a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and an FPGA board with picosecond-level timing. It does advanced signal processing and beamforming. It can see WiFi through walls and track drones in flight. If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine…
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A 10 year old Xeon is all you need
Or running Gemma 4 on a 2016 Xeon with no GPU, 25 flags, 128 GB of DDR3, and a 25B-parameter MoE.
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Qwenputer: A functioning, deterministic RISC-V CPU inside Qwen3.5
I compiled a RISC-V CPU into Qwen 3.5 4B's weights, using its Gated DeltaNet layers as RAM. It runs C and MicroPython inside the forward passes, and Qwen uses it for exact arithmetic.
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I spent $266 and four AI models to own my tablet. GLM-5.3 finished it in a day
Owning a tablet Amazon kept shutting down: CVE-2022-38181, four AI models, five months
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Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it
Abusing an unauthenticated Bluetooth protocol to turn a PC speaker into a Rubber Ducky.
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RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
What if you could strap a full desktop GPU to your MacBook Air? Turns out, you can.
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Hold on to Your Hardware
A warning about rising prices, vanishing consumer choice, and a future where owning a computer may matter more than ever as hardware, power, and control drift toward data centers and away from people.
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My security camera shipped a GitHub admin token in its login page
i dissected some firmware for a Hanwha Wisenet XNP-9300RW and found that it had github admin tokens in it, also miltech is weird
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The MacBook Neo
May the MacBook Neo live so long that its name becomes inapt.
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DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
Today Raspberry Pi announced more price increases for all Pis with LPDDR4 RAM, alongside a 'right-sized' 3GB RAM Pi 4 for $83.75. The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99. Despite today's date, this is not a joke. I published a video going over the state of the hobbyist 'high end SBC' market (4/8/16 GB…
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I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
I turned three security cameras into an automatic bird identification system using BirdNet-Go. Now my wife and I can track every bird species that visits our yard in real-time.
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New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper
For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was to buy an expensive, large, and hot 10 GbE Thunderbolt adapter. With new RTL8159-based 10G USB 3.2 adapters coming onto the market, the bulky adapters might be a thing of the past. Just look at the size of the thing in comparison to my Thunderbolt…
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My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker
I recently got a smart sleep mask from Kickstarter. I was not expecting to end up with the ability to read strangers' brainwaves and send them electric impul...
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Running local models on an M4 with 24GB memory
Experiments with getting usable outputs out of local models on a standard Macbook
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What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
What Chip Weinberger learned building and selling 2500 Jamcorder MIDI recorders.
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Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM
Earlier this year, I blogged about work I did to improve VRAM management for games. Now, after many months of floating around in mailing lists, the kernel patches are finally merged upstream and queued for Linux 7.3! Hooray!
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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
The global memory crunch and the great repricing of consumer electronics
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USB Cheat Sheet (2022)
I spend time investigating a non-existing bug today because I misunderstood a USB term. So I made myself a cheat sheet. Maybe it will save time to someone.
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Show HN: How I topped the HuggingFace open LLM leaderboard on two gaming GPUs
ML, Biotech, Hardware, and Coordination Problems. Sometimes I write about hard problems and how to solve them.
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How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?
People still tell me that CPUs are boring. That nothing much happens anymore. Let us look at AMD Ryzen 7 processors from 2022 to 2024: the 5800X3D (Zen 3), the 7800X3D (Zen 4) and the 9800X3D (Zen 5). They are comparable 8-core chips with 3D V-Cache. I have written about them before, in How stagnant … Continue reading…