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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.
I’ve recently been working on a mechatronics project that involves constructing an X-Y cartesian motion system. I opted to use stepper motors to drive each axis, and timing belts and pulleys for translating the rotational torque of the steppers into linear motion. The timing belts need to be anchored to the component…
As KiCad’s lead developer, Wayne, and his team have a big vision – to build a best-in-breed PCB design tool. It’s an ambitious goal for an open-source project whose commercial counterparts have seen millions in investment. But KiCad is well on that path. An ever-increasing number of designers now use the PCB design…
Running Minicomputer Software
The design of the camera body evolved from a simplified massing of functional elements to refinements based on ergonomics and scale, as I learned more about the strength of the material.
An introduction to my MCU based fully featured analog telephone exchange, how I mounted it in my home lab powered with batteries for months of use
A great engineer (controls being no exception) has to be part hacker, part master craftsman.
G64 files are C64/1541 disk images that contain all bits as they are physically laid out on the 5¼-inch floppy disk. Let’s visualize them! This animation shows 28 regular Commodore 1541 disks. Track 1 contains 21 sectors. Every sector is prefixed by two small red areas: These are the SYNC marks.…
I hope you're not tired of the 8087, because I have another article about Intel's floating-point chip. 1 In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087...
I took a spare ThinkPad T430 and put all my home server workloads on it. Here's how it went.
The last couple of years have been quite revolutionary in the Silicon industry as a whole. With the resurgence of horizo
Some combinations were just meant to be. Peanut butter and jelly, ice cream and spoons, solar panels and canals, and solar photovoltaic (PV) thermal integrated roofing. Who’da thunk. Images Courtesy of TractileOf all the presentations I watched at the Energy Expo one particularly stood out to me. The presentation was…
I'm currently typing this blog post in a floating window in the middle of snow-covered Yosemite. I am a floating body manifested into the transcendental Tim Cook matrix. I look into the sky and follow the soft clouds as they pass overhead. They slowly part, revealing Steve Jobs' smiling face watching over me from the…
Project Starline's early access program allows partners to test Starline and explore how it can help them navigate the future of work.
A couple of days back, Ganesh Venkataramanan, leader of the Tesla Dojo project, announced the Dojo machine learning training system. It’s an unusually network rich, power dense, and memory light design. I’ve summarized the architecture of the system below but I found three aspects of the system particularly…
After more than a year, I finally got to the point where I have more or less 24/7 solar-powered Raspberry Pi microserver.
MongoDB's blog includes technical tutorials, MongoDB best practices, customer stories, and industry news related to the leading non-relational database.
I often get distracted. I obviously don’t like it. So I decided to turn my computer’s clock into a constant reminder to help me focus. Implementation This hack requires: Ubuntu with GNOME desktop environment The Panel Date Format extension A simple bash script 1. Install the Panel Date Format extension # If you don't…
The other day I saw the announcement for the new Chrome OS test laptop and decided to sign up on the off-chance that I might be able to snag one. In the request form I made it very clear that I would be attempting to use this laptop for development (easily my primary activity). Surprisingly the laptop arrived this…
How I upgraded my Macbook's Thunder2 eGPU from a bus-powered GTX 1050 Ti SC to a PSU-powered GTX 1080.
As a founding member of the Open Compute Project (OCP) community, Facebook embraces a collaborative approach to solving industry-wide problems. One of the more pressing problems facing the industry…
Instructions on how to design, calculate and build power transformers.
Programming PIC32 Microcontroller with Rust, AKA running rust on bare metal
Explore Tektronix equipment in films and TV at vintageTEK. Find detailed screenshots and IDs of scopes, probes, and monitors from 1953–1984.
Recent studies have suggested various side-channel attacks for eavesdropping sound by analyzing the side effects of sound waves on nearby objects (e.g., a bag of chips and window) and devices (e.g., motion sensors). These methods pose a great threat to privacy, however they are limited in one of the
