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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,806 posts.
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80386 Multiplication and Division
When Intel released the 80386 in October 1985, it marked a watershed moment for personal computing. The 386 was the first 32-bit x86 processor, increasing the register width from 16 to 32 bits and vastly expanding the address space compared to its predecessors. This wasn't just an incremental upgrade—it was the…
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FemtoStar: Taking Aim for the Stars
Networking and communication is something that has been on our minds as of late. As many of you are surely aware, we have started developing our own solution to private and secure peer-to-peer and group text messaging based on the PineDio gateway system, available next month. While we have high hopes for this system…
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FaSTer: Atari ST Digital Magazine
A magazine on a floppy from 1986.
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Adventures using and repairing an X131e laptop from 2011
This article covers several repairs, one including reverse engineering the BIOS to allow replacement parts. Feel free to scroll down and skip to this content.
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An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator
A very warm welcome to my most ambitious project to date. In this project I’m going to attempt to design and build a sprite-based graphics accelerator that will function as a co-processor to an MCU. Using cheap off-the-shelf components I’m hoping to achieve a level of gaming performance that compares well to popular…
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Weird and Innovative Chips (2007)
The GDP was exclusively object oriented - normal linear memory access wasn't allowed, and there was hardware support for data hiding, methods, inheritance, late binding, and access protection, and it was promoted as being ideal for the Ada programming language. To enforce this, permission and type checks for every…
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Binary modding a water dispenser to save me from pressing a button (2021)
A few months ago, I decided that it’s time I started to become more responsible and to start drinking more water. Unfortunately, the tap water where I live has a very high calcium content, which makes it a lot better when filtered and cooled first. To solve both issues, I picked up a second-hand professional water…
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Looking into the Nintendo Alarmo
While everyone was waiting on news for the successor of the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo released the Alarmo. A small plastic alarm clock that ...
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Building a Galaksija
Note: this is the first part of three articles about my experience building a 1980s Yugoslav 8-bit computer called the Galaksija. This part is mostly focused on the technical aspects of building this…
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macOS Sierra Leaks Image of MacBook Pro with Magic Toolbar
Welp, it is real. These images are straight out of System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/PassKitUI.framework/Versions/A/Resources on my Mac running 10.12.1: There’s a lot to parse here. Clearly, the rumors of a Magic Toolbar are all correct, as well the inclusion of Touch ID to the right of the Toolbar. It looks like…
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Talking to memory: Inside the Intel 8088 processor's bus interface state machine
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor. IBM's decision to use the 8088 processor in the I...
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Pixel Watch 3
Pixel Watch 3, the latest version of our flagship smartwatch, offers a stunning design combined with even better performance.
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Toyota Develops Packaged Fuel Cell System Module for Hydrogen Utilization
Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) has developed a product that packages a fuel cell (FC) system into a compact module and plans to begin selling it in the spring of 2021 or later. The new module will be easily utilized by companies that are developing and manufacturing FC products for wide variety of applications…
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Why doesn't Apple make a standalone Touch ID?
I finally upgraded to a mechanical keyboard. But because Apple's so protective of their Touch ID hardware, there aren't any mechanical keyboards with that feature built in. But there is a way to hack it. It's incredibly wasteful, and takes a bit more patience than I think most people have, but you basically take an…
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Preserving a floppy disk with a logic analyzer and a serial cable
Being involved with retro computers, I have a few floppy disks (of the 3.5-inch variety) that I would like to preserve as faithfully as possible. Of course, I know there are dedicated devices for doing that, such as the Kryoflux or the SuperCard Pro . But it occurred to me that I already own the required hardware to…
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Windows 11: TPMs and Digital Sovereignty
The problem with enforcing TPMs on consumers
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How fast SSDs slow to a crawl: thermal throttling (2021)
Fast compact external SSDs are prone to thermal throttling. This is demonstrated during tests writing 96 files, when transfer rates fell from 2 GB/s to around 700 MB/s.
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Engineers Investigate a Simple, No-Bake Recipe to Make Bricks from Martian Soil
Explorers planning to settle on Mars might be able to turn the planet’s red soil into bricks without needing to use an oven or additional ingredients. Instead, they would just need to apply pressure to compact the soil—the equivalent of a blow from a hammer. These are the findings of a study published in Nature…
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Installing UEFI Firmware on ARM SBCs
I'm going to neuralyze the SPI flash and install some Kelvin Timeline firmware that will allow me to boot and install generic ARM Linux images on a ROCK 5 ITX+.
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One-bit Computing at 60 Hertz
an extremely simple processor design
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Building a Digital Audio Mixer
Hacking together bits of electronics to route audio
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Connecting a Macintosh SE to the Internet with a Raspberry Pi
How to connect a 68k Mac to the internet without an ethernet card!
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Building a vacuum tube computer
Having 32 (31) registers, this means that a refresh will be issued each 256us. To be on the safe side, the capacitor should keep its charge much longer than that. Testing with both EAA91 (ideal diode) and some semiconductors: Diode charge hold time Comment EAA91 >500us ideal diode 1N4148 >500us for reference, leakage…
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Booting the IBM 1401: How a 1959 punch-card computer loads a program
How do you boot a computer from punch cards when the computer has no operating system and no ROM? To make things worse, this computer req...