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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.
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Google Home (in)Security
TL;DR: An undocumented API in Google home devices is easily exploitable. This command will reboot any on your local network: nmap –open -p 8008 192.168.1.0/24 | awk ‘/is up/ {print up};…
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Custom telescope mount using harmonic drives and ESP32
How I went from buying a €200 tracker to building a custom telescope mount with harmonic drives, ESP32, and way more engineering than necessary
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Reverse-engineering a tiny 1980s chip that plays Christmas tunes
For the holidays, I decapped a chip that plays three Christmas melodies. The UM66T melody chip from the 1980s was designed for application...
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SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller
An accelerated FAST feature detector for the ESP32-S3 leveraging 128-bit SIMD instructions, achieving ~2x the performance of the reference implementation.
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An always-available, online-capable Raspberry Pi in your pocket
These days, I’m building a lot of hardware projects based on the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi mini computer. Especially with the Raspberry Pi Zero W (an even tinier version, with the W denoting the wifi-capable version), you can have one anywhere and can power it from any USB power source.
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Pixel 3a
A phone from Google that helps you get more done. It has everything you need in a phone, and a camera that you’ll love.
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Why do CPUs have multiple cache levels?
This is a reader question from “jlforrest” that seems worth answering in more detail than just a single sentence: I understand the need for a cache but I don’t understand why there are …
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I wired up my bike's GPS to order me pizza during a gravel race
As harvest season begins here in the Midwest, I once again celebrate by grinding Nebraska gravel at the Gravel Worlds Long Voyage bike race. As in previous years ( 2021 ) ( 2022 ), I spent more time writing code for a marginally-useful project than I did training. But hey, I finished!
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All-new iMac features the M1 chip
Apple today introduced an all-new iMac featuring an extraordinary design enabled by the M1 chip, and the best camera, mics, and speakers ever in a Mac.
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The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
As we head into another gifting season and more and more connected devices make their way onto gift guides, I want to offer a cautionary note. The smart home is like a cat — mostly self-sufficient and nice to have, but also possessing a mind of its own that can lead to frustration and confusion […]
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Arm Announces Public Filing for Proposed Initial Public Offering
Arm announces public filing of registration statement for proposed initial public offering
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Our First Generalist Policy
Our first generalist policy, π0, a prototype model that combines large-scale multi-task and multi-robot data collection with a new network architecture to enable the most capable and dexterous generalist robot policy to date.
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Using an LCD’s poor viewing angle to your advantage
When viewing LCD monitors from an oblique angle, it is not uncommon to witness a dramatic color shift. Occasionally, this can appear as a total color inversion. This is primarily caused by a polarization asymmetry, where light rays passing through the pixel matrix at oblique angles are influenced by the relative…
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Apple Watch Series 5
Apple today announced Apple Watch Series 5, debuting an Always-On Retina display that never sleeps.
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The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader
I’ve had the Xteink X4 for a couple of months now, a £40 e-ink reader small enough to stick to the back of a phone. I’d seen a few posts about it (Khairul Se...
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Using the Web Audio API to Make a Modem
What do you do when you cannot copy text between computers due to lack of internet connectivity? I built a modem using the Web Audio API, allowing data transfer via audio.
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Building a USB SNES Controller
A few years ago on a trip to Tokyo, we took a day to explore Akihabara. We found a shop that was selling retro gaming stuff and when I saw an old SNES controller for sale I had to buy it.
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Using HDMI radio interference for high-speed data transfer
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
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Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
I’m excited to announce that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the first cloud provider to offer the next generation Intel Xeon processor, codenamed Skylake.
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Starlink User Terminal Teardown
I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go to space. —— Stephen Hawking Starlink is a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite internet service provided by SpaceX. Users connect to near-Earth orbit satellites through a user terminal, which then connects to the internet via ground gateways. Basic Starlink network…
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Mac Chimes of Death
We’re all familiar with the Mac’s startup chime. While it has changed over the years, it has greeted users with its friendly tone for decades. What you may not know is that for years, the Mac also came with a death sound, that would play when the machine was unable to properly boot. And they are glorious: Macintosh II…
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Recovering “lost” treasure-filled floppy discs with an oscilloscope
There are many good, modern solutions for reading data off old floppy discs and drives. Perhaps the best is the Greaseweazle : it's capable,...
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What's New in CPUs Since the 80s and How Does It Affect Programmers?
My mental model of CPUs is stuck in the 1980s: basically boxes that do arithmetic, logic, bit twiddling and shifting, and loading and storing things in memory. I'm vaguely aware of various newer developments like vector instructions (SIMD) and the idea that newer CPUs have support for virtualization (though I have no…