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Hardware & Electronics

The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.

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3302

Introduction to FPGAs

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…

3304

How I discovered my left AirPod was bad

tl;dr: My left AirPod had some hardware issue. I got a new one. Now the AirPods work great. The morning Apple's AirPods went up for sale, I was boarding a plane, and had just gotten to my seat on the plane. I knew they'd be in short supply (though I didn't know just how short—my local Apple Store only gets a small…

3314

Review: A Dive into Mikrotik's Weird SmartNIC (2022)

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…

3318

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…

3325

AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

Cores are the new megahertz, at least for enterprise servers. We've gone quickly from 32, to 64, to 80, to 128, and now to 192-cores on a single CPU socket! Amazon built Graviton 4, Google built Axiom, but if you want your own massive Arm server, Ampere's the only game in town. And fastest Arm CPU in the world is…

3326

My Keyboard

I use a Datahand keyboard . It’s the best thing that’s happened to my fingers and wrists since... It’s the best thing that has ever happened to my fingers and wrists. I see a lot of parallels between the Datahand and pure functional programming (lol). They both take lots of commitment. They change the entire way you…

3328

AMD ROCm: A Wasted Opportunity

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.