61
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 122 posts.
62
Mac Pros, Ara, and Modularity
Early yesterday Motorola announced their ambitious Ara project - a modular phone with interchangable parts and features. In theory it sounds great - battery running low? Swap in a new one. Need a bigger camera for that trip you're going on? Pop one in - no need for that big DSLR.
63
Google Giving Will Provide 15,000 Raspberry Pi's to UK Schools
Today’s been a bit unlike most Tuesdays at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Today we’re the recipients of a very generous grant from Google Giving, which will provide 15,000 Raspberry Pi Model Bs for schoolkids around the UK. Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, has just been to visit Cambridge, and he and Eben have…
64
The $12 Gongkai Phone
Recently, I paid $ 12 at Mingtong Digital Mall for a complete phone, featuring quad-band GSM, Bluetooth, MP3 playback, and an OLED display plus keypad for the UI. Simple, but functional; nothing compared to a smartphone, but useful if you’re going out and worried about getting your primary phone wet or stolen.
65
Leap Motion: Amazing, Revolutionary, Useless
I desperately want it to work, don't you? Just like Minority Report. You wave ...
66
An engineer's emergency kit business card
NEW! You can now buy a version of this board! (Read more .) Circuit board business cards have been done . But since circuit boards ...
67
68
The 6502 CPU's overflow flag explained at the silicon level
In this article, I show how overflow is computed in the 6502 microprocessor at the transistor and silicon level. I've discussed the mathema...
69
70
Intel i7 loop performance anomaly
Recently I've been doing some benchmarking and came upon a very surprising behavior from a number of different Intel i7 CPUs (it manifests on Sandy Bridge and Haswell desktop-class CPUs as well as Sandy Bridge-EP Xeon CPUs).
71
72
Farming hard drives: 2 years and $1M later
Get all of the latest cloud storage news and insights from Backblaze - the leading independent cloud storage provider.
73
74
Windows Timer Resolution: Megawatts Wasted
The default timer resolution on Windows is 15.6 ms – a timer interrupt 64 times a second. When programs increase the timer frequency they increase power consumption and harm battery life. They also…
75
Meet a Shenzhen Maker: Mr. Chen
Meet a Shenzhen Maker: Mr. Chen | Automate ALL the things!
76
Smartphone can use its microphone to extract RSA decryption key from laptop
This is neat: Here, we describe a new acoustic cryptanalysis key extraction attack, applicable to GnuPG’s current implementation of RSA. The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers (of various models), within an hour, using the sound generated by the computer during the decryption of…
77
80 FFTs Per Second To Detect Whistles and Switch On Lights
Hey guys As the slightly changed adage goes: a video is worth a thousand words: Interested? Have a look at my tindie page or click below to get more technical details... So, why
78
Tiny, cheap, and dangerous: Inside a fake iPhone charger
Thoughts on the death of Ma Ailun According to reports , a woman in China was tragically electrocuted using her iPhone while it was char...
79
80
81
82
Ludde's FPGA NES
I was a bit bored during Christmas, so I decided to construct a whole Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in an FPGA . An FPGA is a progra...
83
84
Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen
On September 13th 2013 George Hahn wrote a popular blog post titled “Why the PhoneBloks phone will never happen”. Still to this day, PhoneBloks remains only a concept without any concrete plans to go to market.
85
86
Hyperloop lets you travel on a resonant acoustic wave?
Elon Musk is a fascinating guy, and his Hyperloop concept equally so. Now that the details have started trickling out, almost in the form...
87
Why is my TI-99/4A in Black and White?
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Longtime readers may remember a previous article where we implemented TI-99/4A BASIC as a Scripting Language for modern computers. Recently I got nostalgic for the actual hardware so I got my 99 out of the closet where it had been for a decade o…
88
The Raspberry Pi’s Hardware Random Number Generator
Hey! This is a bit old! Things may have changed and I haven’t necessarily fixed them. Most computers can’t create true random numbers. They use a formula which makes a very long stream …
89
Surprisingly simple scheme for self-assembling robots
Small cubes with no exterior moving parts can propel themselves forward, jump on top of each other, and snap together to form arbitrary shapes.
90
What Every Hardware Startup Should Know About the Electronic Component Landscape
You can find lifecycle status information on manufacturer websites, or through us .