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Hardware & Electronics

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

Any year
3572

A DX7 USB Dongle

The amazing Rene Stange added USB Gadget (i.e. device) support to the Circle bare metal Raspberry Pi environment a while ago so I’ve now incorporated that into MiniDexed. This allows MiniDexe…

3580

NEC’s Forgotten FPUs

NEC had a cross license agreement with Intel dating back to April of 1976 that allowed each company to make/sell products based on each others patents. This was particularly important in the 1970’s as having a viable ‘second source’ for your designs was considered critical for it to be viable in the market. This was…

3587

A Small Ode to the CRT

I used to hate Cathode Ray Tubes . As a kid in Europe, everything flickered at 50Hz, or made a loud whistle at 15.625KHz (back when I could still hear it). CRTs just seemed crude, “electro-brutalist” contraptions from the valve era. They were heavy, and delicate, and distorted, and blurry, and whistled, and gave…

3594

Dumping MiniDisc Media

Update 2022: Web MiniDisc Pro can access NetMD devices through the browser and can also download protected files! If you have music on a collection of MiniDisc media and want to finally copy the data off onto modern media (or the cloud!), here are simple instructions for some different solutions:

3597

Active cooling your Raspberry Pi 3

Raspberry Pi 3 devices tend to overheat when they run prolonged heavy loads. When the processor’s internal temperature approaches 85 degrees Celsius, it protects itself by downclocking or shutting down completely. This can adversely affect performance of AI models.