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Building a Frankenstein 64
👶 From when Mosaic took over Gopher. 🏢 VP of Engineering @ Cloudflare 🕹️ Slightly addicted to retrocomputing 🔍 Hit Ctrl-K to Search
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 474 posts.
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Physical Knobs and Elixir
I like production gear. Audio, video and .. miscellaneous. I like things that seem like they'll make me oh-so-very productive. I'm a sucker prosumer as a hobby. Let's talk about Elgato, Elixir and why I never actually get anything done. This is unfortunately not sponsored by a prosumer brand, or anyone, that'd have…
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OKTO35 3D-Printed Analog Film Movie Camera
In the very beginning, there was … well, this thing. The OKTO35 Mk1. A machine that could (barely) shoot and scan its own 35mm film movies.
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Hilbert Transform
Concise summary of the Hilbert transform: mathematics, effects on signals, and applications in telecommunications.
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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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Emulating an iPod Touch 2G using QEMU
My personal website.
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Hardware trojans under a microscope (2022)
Table of Contents
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MiniDisc Hacking
Most MiniDisc aficionados are aware of unit hacking to gain access to new features. The unit that perhaps benefits the most from this is the Sony MZ-N510, which also comes in the N520 and NF610 variants. The 2001 model R700 can be hacked to add many features of its upscale brother, the R900 , as well as the Type-R…
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Infra-Red, in Situ (Iris) Inspection of Silicon
Cryptography tells us how to make a chain of trust rooted in special-purpose chips known as secure elements. But how do we come to trust our secure elements? I have been searching for solutions to this thorny supply chain problem . Ideally, one can directly inspect the construction of a chip, but any viable inspection…
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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…
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Discovery could extend battery life by replacing tape that causes self‑discharge
Thanks to a discovery in a Dal lab, manufacturers of laptops and other tech devices now have an explanation for why the batteries that power their gadgets tend to lose some of their charge over time and a path forward to fixing the problem..
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Inside the 8086 processor's instruction prefetch circuitry
The groundbreaking 8086 microprocessor was introduced by Intel in 1978 and led to the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and se...
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Reverse-engineering the division microcode in the Intel 8086 processor
While programmers today take division for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — division required a sl...
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Reverse-engineering the 8086 processor's address and data pin circuits
The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) started the x86 architecture that continues to this day. In this blog post, I'm focusing on a small p...
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The complex history of the Intel i960 RISC processor
The Intel i960 was a remarkable 32-bit processor of the 1990s with a confusing set of versions. Although it is now mostly forgotten (outs...
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RISC-V Business: Testing StarFive's VisionFive 2 SBC
It's risky business fighting Intel, AMD, and Arm, and that's exactly what Star Five is trying to do with this: The chip on this new single board computer could be the start of a computing revolution—at least that's what some people think! The VisionFive 2 has a JH7110 SoC on it, sporting a new Instruction Set…
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Homelab analog telephone exchange
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
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x86 is dead, long live x86
The last couple of years have been quite revolutionary in the Silicon industry as a whole. With the resurgence of horizo
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Water Cooled Rooftop Solar Panels
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…
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SolarPi experiment 2: Finally something that works
After more than a year, I finally got to the point where I have more or less 24/7 solar-powered Raspberry Pi microserver.
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Building Alex Taradov’s open-source USB sniffer
A couple of months ago I stumbled upon a post on Hackaday about an inexpensive open-source USB 2.0 sniffer created by Alex Taradov . This is a really cool project! Normally, USB sniffers like this can cost thousands of dollars, especially if you’re paying for fancy protocol decoding and also want high-speed 480 Mbps…
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Box64 and RISC-V
Box64 and RISC-V, the challenges of wrtting the Dynarec, and benchmarks
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Digikey's Physical Connectors Tutorial
There are many different kinds of connectors, all serve the same purpose but in different ways. This article discusses connectors and their typical applications.
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Stable LM 3B: Bringing Sustainable, High-Performance LMs to Smart Devices
Our latest language model, Stable LM 3B, is a compact language model designed to operate on portable digital devices like handhelds and laptops.
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Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer
Vodafone today unveiled a prototype 5G network built on a credit card sized Raspberry Pi personal computer and an equally small, advanced silicon chipset. This industry-first concept will enable small businesses and households to extend 5G coverage and increase capacity according to their needs and to have their very…
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IBM PC 8088 replaced with a Motorola 68000
I was wondering what the IBM Personal Computer would have been like if they had chosen the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8088, so I used my MCL86+ to emulate the 68000 and find out! The MCL86…