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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 474 posts.
The original NMOS version of the MOS 6502, used in computers like the Commodore 64, the Apple II and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), is well-known for its illegal opcodes: Out of 256 possible opcodes, 151 are defined by the architecture, but many of the remaining 105 undefined opcodes do…
A breadboard with visual indication of overheating of the parts.
This is the ottopot. It's a MIDI controller I made with nothing but 8 dials. However, the dials I made in the highest quality that I possibly could. There are 2 things in particular that I haven't seen in any other similar devices: High resolution with 14bit MIDI CCs (12bit effective resolution) and a quasi-1:1…
These extensions expand the x86 instruction set with access to registers and features that improve performance.
Why monitors priced from hundreds to thousands of dollars often use the same low-cost PM modules, and what that means for performance claims.
iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max users can now capture spatial videos, which they can relive on Apple Vision Pro starting early next year.
I'm working on a project—a very dumb project, mind you—and I was trying to acquire the two current-gen flagship GPUs: an Nvidia RTX 4090, and an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. In some weird stroke of luck (it has been difficult to find either in stock), I was able to get one of each this week. (lol at the size difference...)
I partnered up with Mirek (of Mirkotronics / @Mirko_DIY on Twitter) to build the Pi4GPU (or 'PiG' for short): This journey started almost three years ago: almost immediately after the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was launched, I started testing graphics cards on it. First I tried some low-spec cards like the Zotac…
Raspberry Pi Pico W, our wireless-enabled variant of our Pico platform, built around our RP2040 microcontroller, now has Bluetooth support.
Christopher Getschmann
Tunneling is an important technology for modern civilization, as a tunnel is often the only reasonable way to create a direct path between two points.
Old-school cathode ray tube TVs have become de rigeur in the retro scene as the true way to experience retro games “the way they were designed”. But there’s ...
How I received the signal of MANY satellites with an RTL-SDR V3
I've studied a lot of chips from the 1970s and 1980s, so I usually know what to expect. But an Ethernet chip from 1982 had something new: a ...
Sterling welding with the Lampert PUK04 pulse arc welder.
Most of my systems are microcomputers (and commensurately sized), though I do have some moderately larger beasts: you've met homer , my 1987...
In this article, I go over Raspberry Pi 5 vs. Orange Pi 5 Plus vs. Rock 5 Model B regarding their specs, performance, and prices.
Researchers in the lab of Brent Fultz have discovered why so-called Invar alloys keep a steady size and shape over a broad range of temperatures—unlike most materials.
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.
A key concept for a processor is the management of "state", information that persists over time. Much of a computer is built from logic gate...
Introduction Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are a form of programmable hardware that has become inexpensive and accessible recently. I recently purchased a Digilent Basys 3 FPGA development…
an addendum has been posted, read it here 2023/12/02 - Hello, Hacker News! Check out these pictures of my cat: https://emma.pet Back in February, Mikrotik announced the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe, a peculiar 25gbps NIC. They’ve thrown an entire router into a PCIe NIC. But why? Wait, why? Mikrotik’s product listing has…
The groundbreaking Intel 386 processor (1985) was the first 32-bit processor in the x86 line. It has numerous internal registers: general-pu...
This post will mainly focus on ROCm HIP wasted opportunities for adoption. I wrote an overview of ROCm earlier at https://threedots.ovh/blog/2021/11/what-is-amd-rocm/ . This post will specifically eschew talking about issues about the API renames in ROCm HIP – breaking source compatibility with CUDA quite needlessly.
U.S. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts has sent a much-needed letter to car manufacturers asking them to clarify a surprisingly hard question to answer: what data cars collect? Who has the ability to access that data? Private companies can often be a black box of secrecy that obscure basic facts...
