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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 460 posts.
tapo now logs in over the TPAP protocol, so the Third-Party Compatibility switch in the Tapo app can stay off. Also new: H200 and H500 camera hubs with recording downloads, and plug schedules and timers.
Walking between the receiver and TV station causes a slight disturbance to the signal, but it's nothing to write home about:
The Space Shuttle's five 1 general-purpose computers played a critical role in each flight: controlling the engines, monitoring thousands o...
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This chip...
(This is an adapted version of part of an article I wrote for the Dutch amateur radio magazine Electron , August 2016.)
Google has worked with the open source communities to build OpenTitan, the first open source silicon Root of Trust (RoT).
Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, providing lab space for astronauts and experiment...
杰哥的{教学，运维，编程，调板子}小笔记
data centers are so cool there should be one in every house
In the 1970s, floating-point arithmetic was a mess. Computer manufacturers had a dozen incompatible arithmetic standards. Moreover, floating...
Having created a laptop style case for my ZX Spectrum Next dev board previously, I wanted to re-visit the idea of a Spectrum laptop and address some of the issues faced in the previous version.
This article was written entirely by a human, for humans. I tend to get excited about certain chips. This time, it was a microprocessor: The Rockchip …
A collection of Maroš Grego's works.
Paper packaging offers a number of advantages over its plastic counterparts: It has a high recycling rate, lower CO₂ emissions, and lower disposal costs. However, it cannot yet be sealed without adhesives or layers of plastic—a disadvantage for manufacturing and recycling processes. In the PAPURE project, four…
Catherine (Whitequark)’s recent observations on poorly-engineered firmware reminded me of a few mistakes I’ve seen in vendors’ CPUs; some unimportant and others surprisingly bad. Since I’ve never seen these widely discussed, here’s some discussion and links to supporting evidence to make them more widely known, since…
Any Boolean function can be computed with Tofolli gates, and Tofolli gates are reversible, and so any Boolean function can be computed reversibly.
If you'd asked me a few years back if I thought I'd buy a 3D printer, I would have said no. My experience of 3D printers back when I was in college was that they were very slow, expensive, frequently failed mid-print, and needed constant calibration...
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 808...
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.
Samsung Electronics' Semiconductor Research Center presented the paper “First Demonstration of 3D Stacked FETs at Gate Pitch of 42 nm Featuring Triple Stacked Nanosheet Channels for Advanced Logic Applications” at the 2026 VLSI Symposium, held from June 14–18.
I’ve always wanted an ARM server in my homelab. But earlier, I either had to use an underpowered ARM system, or use Asahi which not only requires expensive Mac hardware but also slowed down in the past few years.
People are moving away from corporate controlled tech, and making their own. How the designs of cyberdecks are being driven by women. And how medieval guilds, Luddites, and the Arts and Crafts movement are all connected to our current moment.
In 2006, CHM curators traveled to Germany to follow a lead on an abandoned collection of historical computing artifacts. In a three-story warehouse, they found a real-world timeline of computing history. After days of exploring and assessing, they brought back nearly 2,000 items for the permanent collection.
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…
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...
In my last post, I showed you to use FireWire on a Raspberry Pi with a PCI Express IEEE 1394 adapter. Now I'll show you how I'm using a new FireWire HAT and a PiSugar3 Plus battery to make a portable MRU, or 'Memory Recording Unit', to replace tape in older FireWire/i.Link/DV cameras. The alternative is an old used…
Linux kernel experiments implementing IB verbs over consumer Thunderbolt/USB4 hardware to give cheap mini-PCs high-performance RDMA suitable for cluster inference.
We traded the physical boundaries of dedicated rooms for the convenience of our always-on digital lives -- but recently I've been building those walls back up.
Back in 2015, I had the idea for gpiozero — a Python library for Raspberry Pi, making programming GPIO devices simpler by abstraction: instead of thinking about pin channels, voltages, pull-up resistors and rising or falling edges, we think about buttons being pressed and released, sensors...
I'm building an 80386-compatible core in SystemVerilog and blogging the process. In the previous post , we looked at how the 386 reuses one barrel shifter for all shift and rotate instructions. This time we move from real mode to protected and talk about protection .
