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Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 421 posts.
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Adam74: A terminal for a small 8-bit computer
Something that struck me reading about the history of the Apple I computer was the fairly simple “ASCII bus” that it used for input and output. As I understand it a hobbyist back in the day could get an ASCII keyboard that quite literally presented as an interface a header giving 7-bits of ASCII and an additional…
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Linux Developer Laptops: Dell's Precision 5500 series reigns supreme (2019)
I’m an entrepreneur and engineer focused on AI developer tools and data systems. My principal role is Founder at Kenn Software . I am also a Principal Architect at Posit , where I contribute to Python and AI strategy. I was a founder of Voltron Data , Ursa Labs (with Posit ), and DataPad. I wrote Python for Data…
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Device wraps around hot surfaces, turns wasted heat to electricity
Penn State scientists have created flexible thermoelectric devices that can wrap around pipes and other hot surfaces, converting wasted heat into electricity more efficiently than previously possible.
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ESP32-C5: Espressif’s First Dual-Band Wi-Fi 6 MCU
Espressif’s ESP32-C5 is the industry’s first RISC-V SoC solution that supports 2.4 and 5 GHz dual-band Wi-Fi 6, along with Bluetooth LE. It is designed for applications that require a high-efficiency wireless transmission.
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Recovering a password-protected ThinkPad T60
An illustrated overview about the process of clearing the supervisor password from a ThinkPad T60, based on guides that some smart and persistent people have written.
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RISC-V is getting MSIs
Message signaled interrupts or MSIs describe a way to signal an interrupt without a dedicated interrupt request pin (IRQ). One of the most prevalent uses for MSIs is the PCI bus, and the PCI specification defines the MSI and MSI-X standards. The potential benefits may include: (1) reduced number of direct wires from…
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RISC-V Celebrates Upstreaming of Android Open Source Project RISC-V Port
RISC-V Community News Success in the mobile and consumer device market depends on a vibrant software ecosystem. Over the past decade the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) has become one...
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The mainframe in your pocket running minicomputer software
Running Minicomputer Software
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Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?
I took a spare ThinkPad T430 and put all my home server workloads on it. Here's how it went.
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Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
Project Starline's early access program allows partners to test Starline and explore how it can help them navigate the future of work.
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The Talos II, Blackbird POWER9 systems support tagged memory
Nowadays, there is increasing interest in adding tagged memory functionality to CPU architectures. Such architectures associate one or more tag bits with each quantum of a system's memory. There are many motivations for this ability to associate “metadata” with individual memory words, but one of the most clear is the…
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Ryzen 7000 amdgpu boot hang
So you decided to build a brand new system using all the latest and coolest tech, so you buy a Ryzen 7000 series Zen 4 CPU, like the Ryzen 7700X that I picked, with a new mother board and DDR5 memory
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Computers Built to Last
I've recently thought a lot about the essay The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum. It's a delightful piece about the author's ideal, long-lasting computational platform - precisely the thing I enjoy reading. It's got a nice blend of slow tech and libre computing advocacy mixed with personal ponderings centered…
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AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx
View the press release archives from AMD.
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Modernizing my 1980s sound system
Where the last two posts were primarily about software ( Navidrome and beets , respectively), this post will be more about hardware (and a bit of software to control it). Hopefully it’ll be useful to others with older sound hardware, especially those who are compelled (as I am) to avoid buying a “connected” device…
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SMIC reaches 7nm without access to western equipment and technologies
Comparison confirms that SMIC reaches 7nm without access to western equipment & technologies. Our analysis also uncovered many similarities between the SMIC 7nm and the TSMC 7nm, which are available in our comparison brief.
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86Box: Why Not Pentium III?
When does “preservation” in emulation become impractical?
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Italian CPU – The Genesys B52 MMX
On this site you can read about thousands of processors models. And every year it is more and more difficult to write about some new (old) processors, since everything has been known for a long time. But there are also exceptions to the rule which we love to find. In 2021, I learned about one unusual processor, the…
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Google Kubernetes Engine adds support for Arm nodes
With Google Kubernetes Engine’s (GKE) support for the new Tau VM T2A, you can run your containerized workloads on the Arm architecture.
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What's the risk from fake Yubikeys?
I found this on a security-related Slack (shared with permission). It launched an entertaining discussion about the risks of taking a potentially fake FIDO token. We all know the risks of taking a free USB drive and shoving it in our computer, right? USB sticks can install software, act as a keylogger, transmit data…
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Anti-Interdiction on the Librem 5 USA
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.
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X-ray reverse-engineering a hybrid module from 1960s Apollo test equipment
In this blog post, I reverse-engineer a hybrid module that was used for ground-testing of equipment from the Apollo space program. But fir...
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Converting from the Game Gear to the Master System
Sometimes people ask me: “Nicole, how do you convert a Master System game to the NES?”, or some other combination of game consoles. And the answer is invaria...
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Building a fast all-SSD NAS on a budget
I edit videos non-stop nowadays. In a former life, I had a 2 TB backup volume and that stored my entire digital life—all my photos, family video clips, and every bit of code and text I'd ever written. Video is a different beast, entirely. Every minute of 4K ProRes LT footage (which is a very lightweight format…
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Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64”
We rarely, if ever, make responses to blog posts or articles. In fact, there is only one instance that I can think of when we did so. So then, somewhat uncharacteristically, this is a response post to Martijn Braam’s blog in which he explains why he left the PINE64 community. Let’s get one thing out of the way first…