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The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)
Long thought impossible, helium has been one of the greatest breakthroughs for high-capacity HDDs. This is the story the science behind them.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 463 posts.
302
Memory Mapping an FPGA from an STM32
I teased at this a bit in my previous posts and finally have a setup I’m happy with, so I thought I’d do a more in-depth writeup.
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The Orange Pi 5 Plus
The launch of the Raspberry Pi 5 was a bit… underwhelming, to be honest. Part of that is because the Raspberry Pi Foundation favors incremental improvement ...
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We don't need a DAC on the ESP32-S3
There's no DAC on the ESP32-S3 - but that's not a problem - we'll just use PDM!
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Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked
What follows is the story of how I fixed not one, but two, different flawed Altera USB Blaster clone devices that never worked correctly after I bought them.
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ESP32: leaving love notes and entering demoscene territory (2022)
I’ve been tinkering with arduino-like platforms recently (more on the midi synth soon) and got the idea to make a small message board to leave notes to my girlfriend. This is how I ended up with a simulator, an integration with a demoscene tracker, custom tools to make palette cycling effects, having to learn CAD to…
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Replace Philips Hue Automation with Home Assistant's
This is the 3rd post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. I’m the happy owner of a couple of Philips Hue connected lights for a some years. Some of them are colored, some of them regular. In addition, I bought a sensor to go along with the light I installed in my toilets: it turns on automatically when…
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Could we build a computer designed to last at least fifty years? (2021)
The computer built to last 50 years par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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JEDEC publishes GDDR7 graphics memory standard
ARLINGTON, Va., USA – MARCH 5, 2024 – JEDEC Solid State Technology Association , the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, is pleased to announce the publication of JESD239 Graphics Double Data Rate (GDDR7) SGRAM. This groundbreaking new memory standard is available for free…
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Long distance sound localization with the Raspberry Pi
TDOA Sound Localization is determining the source of a sound when all you know is the differences in the time of arrival of the sound event…
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Modos Paper Monitor Pre-Launch on Crowd Supply
A fast, low-latency, open hardware e-ink monitor and dev kit
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Firmware update hides a device’s Bluetooth fingerprint
A smartphone’s unique Bluetooth fingerprint could be used to track the device’s user–until now. A team of researchers have developed a simple firmware update that can completely hide the Bluetooth fingerprint, eliminating the vulnerability.
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PSA: If you're a fan of ATmega, try AVR Dx
A little-known offshoot of the ATmega series of 8-bit microcontrollers is better, faster, and cheaper than its progenitor.
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DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13
DeepComputing is excited to announce the launch of an exclusive early access program for the DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard, specifically designed for industry and business customers. This limited-edition initiative gives early adopters hands-on experience with premium, modular RISC-V development hardware, while their…
316
An unusual 7400-series chip implemented with a gate array
When I look inside a chip from the popular 7400 series, I know what to expect: a fairly simple die, implemented in a straightforward, cost-e...
317
Bit-Banging Bluetooth Low Energy
Dmitry.GR: Creating BTLE-compliant advertisement packets, so that iOS and android devices can see and parse them.
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Heat exchanger masks for cold weather cycling (2019)
(updated, March 2025) How I Started Caring About Heat Exchanger Masks Back in the 90s I started riding my bike to work after a hiatus of a few years. My coworkers would regularly ask me if I was go…
319
How the SNES Graphics System Works
Last week's article discussed how the Super Nintendo's Video system feeds the TV's CRT. Today I'll summarize what I understand of the hardware generating these graphics.
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Programming a CH32v003 with light
A comedic example, parked nicely on the thinnest wedge of the venn diagram, is the HamFurs – people who do amateur radio while wearing fur suits. While it isn't my cup of tea, I love that such a group exists. They seemed like nice people when I chatted to them.
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Cerebras Inference now 3x faster: Llama3.1-70B breaks 2,100 tokens/s
Cerebras powers the world's fastest AI inference on the biggest wafer chip. Cerebras CS-4 delivers up to 30x faster inference than GPUs.
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Spreadsheet "breaks" Apple Vision Pro eye-tracking
I am trying to capture “through the optics” pictures of the AVP, and it is unveiling both interesting information on how the AVP works and the second test pattern I tried “broke&#…
323
Starlink terminal revision 4: overview and tests
Revision 4 is the new version of the Starlink user terminal. As of February 2024, the new version is only available in the US. I decided to test the new hardware and compare it to the well-known REV3 (a.k.a. Gen2/V2 or “Standard Actuated”).
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Intel announces the Aurora supercomputer has broken the exascale barrier
At ISC 2024, Intel announces Aurora is the fastest AI supercomputer, has broken the exascale barrier, and details the importance of an open ecosystem in HPC and AI.
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Intel Gaudi2 chips outperform Nvidia H100 on diffusion transformers
Our commitment to developing cutting-edge open models in multiple modalities necessitates a compute solution capable of handling diverse tasks with efficiency. To this end, we conducted a performance analysis, training two of our models, including the highly anticipated Stable Diffusion 3.
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Researchers discover new third class of magnetism
A new class of magnetism called altermagnetism has been imaged for the first time in a new study. The findings could lead to the development of new magnetic memory devices with the potential to increase operation speeds of up to a thousand times.
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MNT Pocket Reform first impressions and hardware
Initial experiences with the MNT Pocket Reform, primarily the hardware (and tinkering!)
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Atari Falcon030
Impressive, but too late to the party