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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,806 posts.

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4621

Commodore 900

Click the Commodore icon to return. Intending to use pictures or text from this page? Please read this notice . Last modify 11 August 2020.

4629

Pruning spaces from strings quickly on ARM processors

Suppose that I give you a relatively long string and you want to remove all spaces from it. In ASCII, we can define spaces as the space character (' '), and the line ending characters ('\r' and '\n'). I am mostly interested in algorithmic and performance issues, so we can simplify the problem by removing all ……

4633

How transistors really work (1995)

Most technician textbooks do a very poor job of explaining the details of transistors' internal workings. First they assume that the Base current is somehow controlling the Collector current, then they try to explain how one current can affect another. These explanations invariably fail because Bipolar transistors…

4640

Ray tracing with uLisp

This is a simple ray tracer written in uLisp, using the uLisp graphics extensions to plot on a colour TFT display. The scene contains five spheres and a plane and can be run on any of the following boards that include an integral TFT display:

4645

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…

4647

The anatomy of a smart bulb

I’ve been having some troubles with Zigbee. Yes, at our airbnb we have a rather big dining room where I’ve put 7 Zigbee RGBWW Smart bulbs. The problem is that each time I try to turn all 7 on or off there’s either a lag or some of them just won’t switch on or off. The controller is a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB dongle, yes…

4648

Hidden Cam Above Bluetooth Pump Skimmer

Tiny hidden spy cameras are a common sight at ATMs that have been tampered with by crooks who specialize in retrofitting the machines with card skimmers. But until this past week I’d never heard of hidden cameras being used at gas pumps in tandem with Bluetooth-based card skimming devices.