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

Any year
3781

The quest for a simple smartwatch

My trusty old smartwatch recently stopped working. It was a Garmin Vivomove HR, a minimal hybrid watch with regular watch hands and a tiny hidden screen that showed notifications and messages. It served me well for quite some time but unfortunately the hidden screen has stopped working and it would cost me as much to…

3785

Where's my petabyte disk drive?

Fourteen years ago I noted that disk drives were growing so fast I couldn’t fill them up. Between 1997 and 2002, storage capacity doubled every year, allowing me to replace a 3 gigabyte drive with a new 120 gigabyte model. I wrote:

3787

Will I ever own a zettaflop?

As the eleventh hour dawns all the pieces start to fall into place. I lived my life knowing this would happen, yet when it is I may be just as unprepared as anyone else. As any self driving car maker knows, predicting doesn’t mean you can act.

3789

ODROID-C2 Compared to Raspberry Pi 3 and Orange Pi Plus

tl;dr: The ODROID-C2 is a very solid competitor to the Raspberry Pi model 3 B, and is anywhere from 2-10x faster than the Pi 3, depending on the operation. The software and community support is nowhere near what you get with the Raspberry Pi, but it's the best I've seen of all the Raspberry Pi clones I've tried. The…

3795

A technical history of Acorn Computers

These pages contain a fairly brief technical history of Acorn Computers. I have decided to focus on the technology because that is where my interests lie. Only very major non-technical events in Acorn's history have been included. If anyone finds any inaccuracies in the following pages please contact me using the link…

3799

Implant.ARM.iLOBleed.a

HP servers provide a management module called iLO (a.k.a. Integrated Lights-Out), which turns on as soon as the power cable is connected, loading a full-blown proprietary operating system. This module has full access to all the firmware, hardware, software, and operating system installed on the server. In addition to…

3803

Chromecast: Exploiting the Newest Device By Google

On Wednesday, July 24th Google launched the Chromecast. As soon as the source code hit we began our audit. Within a short period of time we had multiple items to look at for when our devices arrived. Then we received our Chromecasts the following day and were able to confirm that one of the bugs existed in the build…

3809

Tiny PDP11 on an ESP32

2020 has been a weird year, for everyone around the world. In my specific case, that meant being away from my home in Shanghai, as we were in Europe at the time Covid hit and China did not make it easy to return until somewhere towards the end of the year.

3810

Basic GPU design concepts

we have explored some of the basic architecture concepts in Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) such as graphics pipeline, vector processing, primitive processing, rasterization, fragment processing, pixel operations, graphics architecture and shader programming model There are five basic graphics entity