271
A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine
It started, as many things do these days, by scrolling on X.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 459 posts.
272
Using an $8 smart outlet to avoid brainrot
I wrote a small script that runs in the background, polling for the state of an $8 smart plug .
273
Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan
As it turns out, “thrift shopping” in Japan via the internet can be both very enjoyable as well as very dangerous. In this series of posts, I’ve been examining various optical med…
274
New 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $120
Announcing the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 for use cases that need more capacity, available now at $120. Plus new Raspberry Pi Carbon Removal Credits.
275
New material gives copper superalloy-like strength
Breakthrough material could transform aerospace, defense and industrial applications.
276
It's School time: Adventures in hacking an old Kindle
Jailbreaking an old Kindle and turning it into a school dashboard using Cloudflare Workers, Puppeteer, and image processing.
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A M.2 HDMI capture card
Have you ever looked at an NVMe drive and thought to yourself, 'Hey, this would be 31.7% cooler with HDMI ports?'
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Inside the Apollo “8-Ball” FDAI (Flight Director / Attitude Indicator)
During the Apollo flights to the Moon, the astronauts observed the spacecraft's orientation on a special instrument called the FDAI (Flight ...
281
Cray versus Raspberry Pi
Content copyright © 1995 - 2025 to Bruce Simpson (aka Aardvark), the logo was kindly created for Aardvark Daily by the folks at aardvark.co.uk
282
Next generation LEDs are cheap and sustainable
Cost, technical performance and environmental impact – these are the three most important aspects for a new type of LED technology to have a broad commercial impact on society. This has been demonstrated by LiU-researchers in a new study.
283
Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
I was expecting this to be pretty bad - but it actually came out quite nicely!
284
KiCad and Wayland Support
The KiCad development team frequently receives questions about our support for Wayland. Given that Fedora and Ubuntu are both planning to drop X11 support from their main desktop environments in the near future, we want to provide clear, transparent guidance to our users about the current state of Wayland support in…
285
What you need to know about EMP weapons
Content copyright © 1995 - 2025 to Bruce Simpson (aka Aardvark), the logo was kindly created for Aardvark Daily by the folks at aardvark.co.uk
286
1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises
A new 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 maintains access to low-cost computing amid memory-driven price rises on some other Raspberry Pi products.
287
Choosing an op-amp for your project
Just say no to LM741 and LM324 / LM358.
288
Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry
In 1985, Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor, the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture. To improve performance, the ...
289
PWM flicker: Invisible light that's harming our health?
I recently spent a few weeks running a conference for a community of researchers and writers in a historic chateau in the French…
290
The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A
It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at an architecture that’s completely new to me, and I haven’t done any since creating my new scheme for dedicated platform guides. I’…
291
Designing a Low Latency 10G Ethernet Core (2023)
View the code on GitHub
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How to make a Smith chart
Deriving the basic mathematical properties of the Smith chart from electrical engineering
294
Why does my ripped CD have messed up track names? And why is one track missing?
A delve into CD ripping and metadata
295
What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VSC8512
This is part 3 of my ongoing series about LATENTRED, my project to create an open source 1U managed Ethernet switch from scratch.
296
Using a laptop as an HDMI monitor for an SBC
Though I spend the majority of my time working with microcontroller class devices, I also have an embarassingly robust collection of single board computers (SBC), including a few different Raspberry Pi models, the BeagleV Starlight Beta (RIP), and more. Typically when setting up these devices for whatever automation…
297
I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset
As you may remember, or completely not know, I have a bit of a fascination with old rotary phones . Occasionally, when people learn about this fascination, they donate their old rotary phones to me, so I have ended up with a small collection.
298
The FPGA turns 40
This year marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most exciting and interesting aspects of electronic engineering: the FPGA. The first commercially viable FPGA introduced in 1985 was the Xilinx XC2064, which provided developers with 64 configurable logic blocks, each with a three-input look-up tables. From tiny…
299
Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi
(and Word, and Excel, and so much more) by Nina Kalinina, December 27th, 2025 (rev. 3.00 2026-01-04)
300
Reverse engineering Solos smart glasses
First and foremost: If you’ve got any documentation on this hardware, please contact me! I would love to read the actual specs for this protocol.