3721
Typewriter Plotters (2022)
Did you know there were typewriters that used ball point pens to draw not just text but also graphics? I’ve collected several of these over the years. Read on to discover a world that you didn’t know existed.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.
3722
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…
3723
Sometimes CPU cores are odd
TL;DR: all the assumptions you have about processor design are wrong and if you are unlucky you will never run into problems that users do through sheer chance.
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Updates to Works with Nest
Updates to the Works with Nest platform transition to the Works with Google Assistant platform
3726
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.
3727
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.
3730
Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison
Note: I also posted a separate review of some A2 'Application Performance' class cards, see this post: A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi. As a part-time tinkerer and full-time developer, I have been fascinated by single board computers (SBCs) since the first Raspberry Pi was…
3731
Sega 3-D Glasses: How did they work?
Most people have two eyes, allowing for a stereoscopic view of reality.[citation needed]. Nevertheless, video games are generally designed to run on monitors...
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A Sound Card Before Its Time
A mysterious full-length sound card recently arrived at the OS/2 Museum. It was clearly manufactured by IBM in 1985, and sports a 20 MHz Texas Instrument TMS32010 DSP (the DSP is the large black DIP chip near the lower left corner, not the ceramic gold cap chip).
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The printer that wouldn't print: Fixing an IBM 1401 mainframe from the 1960s
The Computer History Museum has two operational IBM 1401 computers used for demos , but a few weeks ago one computer suddenly couldn't prin...
3736
Inside the 8086 processor, tiny charge pumps create a negative voltage
Introduced in 1978, the revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor led to the x86 processors used in most desktop and server computing today....
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Tofolli gates are all you need
Any Boolean function can be computed with Tofolli gates, and Tofolli gates are reversible, and so any Boolean function can be computed reversibly.
3739
Titan in depth: Security in plaintext
While there are no absolutes in computer security, we design, build and operate Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with the goal to protect customers' code and data. We harden our architecture at multiple layers, with components that include Google-designed hardware, a Google-controlled firmware stack, Google-curated OS…
3740
Wifibroadcast – Analog-like transmission of live video data
Wifibroadcast is a project aimed at the live transmission of HD video (and other) data using wifi radios. One prominent use case is to transmit camera images for a first person view (FPV) of remote…
3741
Lisp Badge – Self-contained ATmega1284 Lisp computer
This is a self-contained computer with its own display and keyboard, based on an ATmega1284, that you can program in the high-level language Lisp:
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Exploring How Cache Memory Works
Even though we often hear terms like L1, L2, cache block size, etc., most programmers have a limited understanding of what cache really is. This is a beginner-friendly primer on how cache works.
3744
Homemade synthetic aperture radar
Second version of the 6 GHz FMCW radar now with SAR images
3745
A Hardware Privacy Monitor for iPhones
Andrew “bunnie” Huang and Edward Snowden have designed a hardware device that attaches to an iPhone and monitors it for malicious surveillance activities, even in instances where the phone’s operating system has been compromised. They call it an Introspection Engine, and their use model is a journalist who is…
3746
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…
3747
Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 3: Inside the disk drive
I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto — a legendary minicomputer from 1973 that helped set the direction for personal computing. This post desc...
3748
Emulating an iPod Touch 2G using QEMU
My personal website.
3749
Scamp – a homebrew 16-bit CPU
I have reached a good milestone on the SCAMP hardware: it can now execute code! It runs all the way through the test program correctly.
3750
Go on Very Small Hardware
How low we can Go and still do something useful? I recently bought this ridiculously cheap board: I bought it for three reasons. First, I have never dealt (as a programmer) with STM32F0 series. Second, the STM32F10x series is getting old. MCUs belonging to the STM32F0 family are just as cheap if not cheaper and has…