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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,806 posts.
Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
Just recently, there was a surge in traffic to my old legacy dial-up sounds pages. While I did my best with the equipment I had at the time to capture the sound of dial-up modems, I always knew tha…
Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
But there’s only one slot, you say? It’s all a matter of using a clever part to adapt a pass-through.
Flipper Zero: How it’s made and tested
Electronics and plastic casing parts of Flipper Zero are manufactured at different factories. Today we will visit the electronics factory and take a look at the automatic PCB testing. There is always a non-zero defect rate when it comes to high-volume production. Some produced PCBs might turn out faulty, some
Getting a Psion 5 palmtop from 1997 online via PPP (and a Raspberry Pi)
Creating the PiRS232 and playing with the Pi over serial has been leading towards an idea - I wanted to create a small, battery powered device, a sidecar that I could carry with my Psion and use as portable Linux terminal. I also managed to turn it into an Internet...
Artificial “muscles” achieve powerful pulling force
MIT researchers have created a fiber-based, lightweight, fast-acting artificial muscle that could be useful for robotics and for prosthetics.
Your Next Smart Home Device is a $30 Used Kindle
If you know how to use a command line, you can build one
GPU Performance for Game Artists
Performance is everybody’s responsibility, no matter what your role. When it comes to the GPU, 3D programmers have a lot of control over performance; we can optimize shaders, trade image quality for performance, use smarter rendering techniques… we have plenty of tricks up our sleeves. But there’s one thing we don’t…
Practical Reverse Engineering Part 4 - Dumping the Flash
Fourth post in the series, detailing how to dump the router's flash chip directly with an SPI programmer, then split and decompress the resulting image into ...
I reverse engineered a motherboard
Wherein I looked into controlling the RGB header on my motherboard without any access to public documentation.
My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer
Acquiring and tricking out a 1989 Apple Macintosh SE/30, the greatest Mac of all time
The Raspberry Pi 4 has a fan now – the Case Fan
Last year, I wrote a blog post titled The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan. And in a video to go along with that post, I detailed the process of drilling out a hole in the top of the official Pi 4 case and installing a 5v fan inside. But that solution wasn't great. The fan was a little loud and annoying, and would stay on…
Creating a low-cost EV charging station with Arduino
Creating a low-cost EV charging station with Arduino: see how a maker built a smart charger for electric vehicles.
Sam Altman Thinks You're Wasting DRAM
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed in a recent podcast discussion that it's "terrible" for everyday people to own DRAM that data centres can use.
Secure Boot in the Era of the T2
Explore the Duo Blog for expert tips, security insights, and resources to stay updated on the latest in security and access management trends.
Baremetal programming on the tinyAVR 0 micro-controllers
All you need is a text editor, a makefile and a USB-serial cable.
Pine64 and Radxa's new Pi CM4-compatible boards
Since the Raspberry Pi was introduced, hundreds of clones have adopted the Pi's form factor (from the diminutive Zero to the 'full size' model B). Often they have better hardware specs, and yet they remain a more obscure also-ran in that generation of Single Board Computer (SBC). So when I saw Radxa's CM3 and Pine64's…
The Serial TTL connector we deserve
Goodbye dangling Dupont pins, hello Julet E-Bike connector. I have them now everywhere, from my router to my servers.
Hardware Stockholm Syndrome
2025-10-05
I built a 10 inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions
I built a 10-inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions and I had a lot of fun doing it. I want to share my build in this post.
Chips and Geopolitics
TSMC showed the power of modularization, and now they are core to the U.S. national security strategy.