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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.
Camera vs. Lidar
Company updates and technology articles from Scale AI.
Warm up your MacBook (2019)
Who else hates putting their hands on an icy metal laptop after it's been riding outside in your cold backpack? Here's a one-line solution.
NitroPhone – Pixel 4a phone with GrapheneOS
Nitrokey launches the NitroPhone, the most secure Android smartphone on the planet. Based on Pixel 6 and GrapheneOS with no Google, no backdoors and hardware security.
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…
Testing the Raspberry Pi 500+'s new mechanical keyboard
Instead of a traditional review of a new Pi product, I thought I'd split things up on my blog, and write two separate posts; this one about the Pi 500+'s new mechanical keyboard, and a separate post about hacking in an eGPU on the Pi 500+, for a massive uplift in gaming performance and local LLMs. The Raspberry Pi…
2012 MacBook Pro Powers on By Itself on Rough Roads
While driving around in the wilds on the bumpy roads of the White Mountains , my MacBook Pro with Retina display keeps waking up. When I pull it out of the leather bag I keep it in, I find that the battery is partly drained, and it is hot.
Installing Linux into a 286 laptop from the year 1989
Ever wondered what useful things you could do with a 32 year old laptop? Well, this is one option: In this project I added a Raspberry PI Zero to the insides of the laptop. Both are connected via a…
Debugging my wife's alarm clock
My wife's alarm clock has been acting up lately. Sporadic at first but then every day, it wouldn't blare in the morning at the set time. Instead, when it was supposed to go off it would... reset itself. The time would start flashing in that "I'm confused because the power went out" sort of way.
Hardening the registers: A cascading failure of edge induced fault tolerance
An article by Anonymous : In 2017, Target announced that we had prioritized stores at the center of how we serve our guests – no matter how they choose to shop. To make this store-as-hubs model work, we spent several years redesigning operations and modernizing how we conduct business. We invested billions of dollars…
An Introduction to C and GUI Programming
An Introductrion to C & GUI Programming, the new book from Simon Long and the Raspberry Pi Press is out now. Get your copy today.
DIY Adapter: Using an e-bike battery to run a laptop
The goal here is to grab power from external battery packs of varying voltages and supply power to 'desktop replacement' sized laptops. This same topology can be used for Dell barrel jack systems.
TCP/IP over audio
We present a simple to use implementation of networking across ultrasonic frequencies, by making use of Gnuradio and a microphone and speakers. This allows you to use TCP/IP , UDP across an audio link.
End of Year Librem 5 Update
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.
Matchstick Brings Firefox OS to Your HDTV
The first HDMI streaming stick powered by Firefox OS has arrived. It’s called Matchstick and we’re looking for your help to create apps for this new device. Background Matchstick ...
An 8-tube module from a 1954 IBM 705 mainframe: it's a key debouncer
IBM's vacuum tube computers of the 1950s were built from pluggable modules, each holding eight tubes and the associated components. I recent...
Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet
I built a device that allows a pinball machine from 1984 to automatically upload scores to the internet. The device taps into the machine’s memory bus and monitors the game state, uploading scores after each game.
More efficient memory-management could enable chips with thousands of cores
MIT researchers have developed the first fundamentally new approach to cache coherence in more than three decades. The more-efficient memory-management scheme — nicknamed Tardis for its time-saving properties — could help enable chips with thousands of cores.
Reverse-engineering a vintage power supply chip from die photos
I recently did a PC power supply teardown so I figured it would be interesting to go deeper and see what happens inside the power supply'...
Why the Z-80's data pins are scrambled
If you look closely at the datasheet for a Z-80 chip, you'll notice the data pins are in a random-looking order. The address pins (A) are ni...
The 101 of analog signal filtering (2024)
Some intuition about this topic can be developed without summoning the ghost of Pierre-Simon Laplace.
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.
NEC’s Tetris Processor
Tetris is a classic time-waster, both in and outside of the office. What good is any computing device if it can’t play this game? Tokyo System House certainly thought so, and ported it to the NEC mini5 line of CP/M-based word processors. Let’s preserve it for future generations and then see what it’s like!
IBM System 360 Model 20 restoration: The big push
Well, where to start! The last few weeks have consisted primarily of anticipation, excitement, and towards the end, utter exhaustion. But finally, FINALLY, the IBM is home!
How DRAM changed the world
From an idea in 1966 to a patent in 1968, DRAM has had an outsized impact on the world with its dynamic random access memory technology enabling everything from mobile phones to automobiles. Cheers to 50+ years of innovation!