391
Your Next Smart Home Device is a $30 Used Kindle
If you know how to use a command line, you can build one
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 421 posts.
392
My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer
Acquiring and tricking out a 1989 Apple Macintosh SE/30, the greatest Mac of all time
393
The 970-HA-JOKES Payphone Project
Have a listen to this classic hold music on infinite loop and be taken back to a time when pay phones ruled the street corner and peppered the mall food court.
394
An Armful of CHERIs
Today, Arm announced that the first silicon supporting the Morello prototype architecture, a research project led by Arm, Microsoft, University of Cambridge and others, is now available on a limited run of demonstration boards, which are being shipped from today to industry partners for testing. Morello is the first…
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Chainless electric drive system “Free Drive” for bicycles (2021)
Schaeffler Website
397
The PalmOS powered wristwatch from Fossil
Imagine a smartwatch you could load any PalmOS app you wanted onto. We had that... about 20 years ago.
398
Live Streaming a Macintosh Plus
Since recording a handful of C Programming on System 6 videos, I've occasionally wanted to live-stream the more casual daily programming being done on my Macintosh Plus. After getting all of the pieces together, I now have a working self-hosted broadcasting setup.
399
Talking with the Moon: Inside Apollo's premodulation processor
The Apollo missions to the Moon required complex hardware to communicate between Earth and the spacecraft, sending radio signals over hund...
400
Childhood toys: 40 years on 2-XL works just fine
Sitting and literally gathering dust on a shelf has been my childhood 2-XL toy . A few years ago I turned it on and it seemed to work but th...
401
Accelerating zk-SNARKs - MSM and NTT algorithms on FPGAs with Hardcaml
In 2022 a consortium of companies ran an international competition, called the ZPrize, to advance the state of the art in “zero-knowledge” cryptography. We d...
402
FreeBSD on the Graviton 3
As far as FreeBSD is concerned, Graviton 3 is mostly just a faster version of the Graviton 2: Most things "just work", and the things which don't work on Graviton 2 — hotplug devices and cleanly shutting down an instance via the EC2 API — also don't work on Graviton 3. (Want to help get these fixed? Sponsor my work on…
403
Sanyo Triple Five
Even though I seem to have terrible luck with x86-based computers, that doesn’t mean I have to take it lying down. I can go out there and cause even worse things to happen to me. Like, for instance, buying a broken super-budget PC-incompatible from 1982.
404
Apple Silicon is an inconvenient truth
Link to: https://wormsandviruses.com/2022/07/a-burger-without-heinz/
405
Reverse-engineering the LM185 voltage reference chip and its bandgap reference
Many circuits, such as a computer power supply or a phone charger, require a stable voltage reference, but it's harder than you might expec...
406
The Intel 80376 – A legacy-free i386 with a twist (2010)
25 years after the introduction of the 32 bit Intel i386 CPU, all Intel compatibles still start up (and wake up!) in 16 bit stone-age mode, and they have to be switched into 32/64 bit mode to be usable.
407
The Apple-1's shift-register memory
Apple's first product was the Apple-1 computer, introduced exactly 46 years ago, on April 11, 1976. This early microcomputer used an unus...
408
BliKVM PCIe puts a computer in your computer
This is the BliKVM PCIe, a full computer on a PCI Express card. This is an IP KVM (Internet Protocol Keyboard-Video-Mouse) that can be put inside another computer or server. Most server motherboards already have remote 'lights-out' management functionality built in. Most frequently this is referred to as IPMI…
409
Converting a WW2-Era Landing Gear and Flaps Indicator into a USB Peripheral
The landing gear and flaps indicator, control board stack, and C# .NET Windows Forms app running on the Surface in the background. Everything set for smooth and level flight!
410
Building my first mechanical keyboard
A friend of mine recently brought up his custom mechanical keyboard while we were hanging out in voice chat, and at first, nobody understood why anyone would buy one. At that time, I had no clue that there are entire communities about building custom keyboards. With every sentence that was said, we got deeper into…
411
Failing to reach DDR4 bandwidth
Unum builds the Search, Storage, and Networking engines powering the modern data stack. Deployed on 100M+ devices, our technology serves DBMS unicorns and frontier AI labs.
412
Meshtastic: A Review
The Meshtastic is my solarpunk dream—a cheap, encrypted, offgrid communicator. But the project is still in the alpha stages (and it shows).
413
Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 6: the control registers
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produ...
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Stanford engineers present new chip that ramps up AI computing efficiency
Stanford engineers created a more efficient and flexible AI chip, which could bring the power of AI into tiny edge devices.
416
Cash, Canadians and CPUs: Intel's 'Lost' Early Microprocessor
The story of Microsystems International and the Intel 4005
417
Large-format camera movements (2020)
For less than a cup of coffee, a downloadable 29-page reference guide to Large Format Camera Movements, keep it on file or conveniently on your phone
418
Reverse-engineering the waveform generator in a 1969 breadboard
How hard could it be to fix a vintage solderless breadboard that doesn't quite work? The "elite 2 circuit design test system" below combin...
419
Nvidia to Share New Details on Grace CPU, Hopper GPU, NVLink Switch, Jetson Orin
Latest chip designs reflect the breadth and depth of NVIDIA’s platform innovation in AI, edge and high performance computing.
420
Twibright Optar – OPTical ARchiver – a codec for encoding data on paper
Data archiving codec for paper, laser printer and scanner