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Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 383 posts.
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Hacking Ethernet out of Fibre Channel cards
This story, like another in the past , started as an eBay purchase that I would soon regret. I was scrolling through my favorite eBay supplier when I found a listing titled Job Lot Of Roughly 350 Various Network Cards . This of course piqued my interest. Some close photo inspection identified a whole load of cards in…
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Librem 5 Phone Dogwood Thermals and Battery Life
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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Controlling My A/C with a Gameboy
Last year, I was lucky enough to be gifted a Gameboy Color in great shape. Apart from its intended gameplay features, I also wanted to try and build something meaningful with it, so I made this application to control my air-conditioner over its existing, reverse-engineered infrared protocol.
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Geeking Out with UEFI
Some people may think some of my past posts get into the weeds, exploring the technical depths of Windows Autopilot, Intune, Windows 10, ConfigMgr, etc. But I would say those generally only g…
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Engineers produce a fisheye lens that’s completely flat
Engineers at MIT and UMass Lowell have designed a wide-angle lens that is completely flat. It is the first flat fisheye lens to produce crisp, 180-degree panoramic images.
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Big Sur on Unsupported Macs
My macOS Big Sur Patcher allowed countless users of older Macs to enjoy the new design and features of macOS Big Sur.
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Precursor’s Custom PCBs
While the last few updates about Precursor have focused on evidence-based trust and security, this update is more about the process of making Precursor itself. There is an essential link between evidence-based trust and understanding the manufacturing process: to convince yourself that something has been constructed…
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Pinebook Pro, First Impressions
After seeing it in action at FOSDEM (from afar, as the crowd was too large), I decided to buy a Pinebook Pro for personal use. From the beginning, the intention was to use it for pkgsrc development, with NetBSD as the main OS. It was finally delivered on Thursday, one day earlier than promised, so I thought I would…
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Z80 Explorer – a Zilog Z80 netlist-level simulator
Z80 Explorer is a Z80 netlist-level simulator capable of running Z80 machine code and also an educational tool with features that help reverse engineer and understand this chip better.
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Updated BBC micro:bit
As we announce the latest micro:bit we invite you to learn about the device and join us to make incredible things with it.
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Tin Can Phone Modem
Mike Kohn's music, software, and electronics projects.
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Apple Silicon and losing our legacy
[Edit] This post sparked a conversation on Ycombinator ! I am concerned about Apple's move to its own home-grown processors. It's not because I'm worried about the new silicon, or Apple's ability to make high-performance CPUs, or even because I am worried about changing architectures. I survived…
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Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS pre-installed
The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is now available in North America and selected EMEA countries* certified with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS pre-installed to work straight out of the box. This is the first system available on the market with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, released in April 2020, and continues the long-standing partnership…
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Porting Firecracker to a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)
Since we got our hands on the new Raspberry Pi 4, we started exploring how various virtualization technologies behave on the board. First thing we tried is how to run Nabla on it and how it compares to native KVM. Next thing we wanted to try is firecracker, the notorious micro-VMM that Amazon Lambda & Fargate run…
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Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)
From home temperature monitoring to a Kubernetes cluster hosting a live Drupal website, I have a lot of experience running Raspberry Pis. I've used every model through the years, and am currently using a mix of A+, 2 model B, and 4 model B Pis. The 3 model B+ was the first generation that had me concerned more about…
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GNU/Linux Smartphone Librem 5 Evergreen Update: Mold and Milestones
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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Leveraging a 3D printer “defect” to create a new quasi-textile
MIT Media Lab graduate student Jack Forman developed DefeXtiles, a tulle-like textile made from polymer filament, by controlling a common 3D printing defect.
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Dumping MiniDisc Media
Update 2022: Web MiniDisc Pro can access NetMD devices through the browser and can also download protected files! If you have music on a collection of MiniDisc media and want to finally copy the data off onto modern media (or the cloud!), here are simple instructions for some different solutions:
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Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound chip from die photos (2017)
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
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Inside the HP Nanoprocessor
The Nanoprocessor is a mostly-forgotten processor developed by Hewlett-Packard in 1974 1 as a microcontroller 2 for their products. Stra...
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New paint atomizer with over 95% coating efficiency
Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) has developed a new type of paint atomizer (airless paint atomizer) that uses static electricity instead of air, to replace the conventional air paint atomizers used in the vehicle body painting process. The newly developed airless painter, the first of its kind in the world, achieves…
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Sensors of largest digital camera snap first 3,200-megapixel images at SLAC
The camera will explore cosmic mysteries as part of the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
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