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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.
Today, we at SFC, along with our OpenWrt member project, announce the production release of the OpenWrt One. This is the first wireless Internet router designed and built with your software freedom and right to repair in mind. The OpenWrt One will never be locked down and is forever unbrickable. This device services…
As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the…
Hacking the T2S+ v2 to work on computers, tear it down for the first time online, and play with lock-in thermography as a bonus!
For reasons I won't get into, I've been working on a tricky reverse engineering puzzle recently: how to patch the operating system of a 26-year-old synthesizer. To be specific, the Kurzweil K2500, a...
Introducing a brand new to-do entity type and use it locally with Todoist or Google Tasks. Matter 1.2 is here! New conditions for the conditional card to tailor your dashboards, select custom date ...
Making the iPod engraver page for Apple’s online store
How simple circuits can create complex behaviors
Apple today introduced Apple Watch Series 12, engineered to deliver the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable.
...or at least, not without a lot of patience or a fat wallet. But why? And are there any signs Raspberry Pis will become available to the general public again soon? To be clear, I'm speaking of the mainstream SBC Raspberry Pis, like the Pi 4 model B, the Compute Module 4, the Pi Zero 2 W, and even in many cases the…
As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I…
Historically, proprietary systems created the need for binary machine interfaces. This extended to the deepest layers of the system, where the PC BIOS was…
I got some fancy new speakers last week. They’re powered speakers and they have streaming service integrations built in, unlike the 35-year-old passive speakers I’m upgrading from. Overall they’re great! But they’re so loud that it’s difficult to make small volume adjustments within the range of safe volume levels for…
An introductory technical analysis of the Yamaha DX7, detailing some of the known information about the synthesiser’s engineering.
Lumafield’s Battery Quality Report exposes hidden risks in 18650 cells; 1 in 13 low-cost units have dangerous defects. See how CT helps enforce safety.
This is my journey building an open source car system with Go & Qt, rear camera, live OpenGL map … Cross compilation In Part I, I had to patch qtmultimedia for the camera to work, but Qt compilation is resource hungry, same goes for the osrm compilation, the memory of the Raspberry Pi is too small. I had to to set up…
<p>Yesterday, we gave away our ~6-year-old GE French-door refrigerator after a never-ending slog of repairs. At least the guy and his mother who came to pick it up have a side-hustle of repairing and reselling appliances. There's hope it won't end up in a landfill. He offered to sell me a 4-door Samsung. No Thanks!…
Laser cutters can injure or blind you permanently if you do not follow safety procedures! This post is an attempt to collect all of the information that I’ve gathered over the last year or so regarding budget laser cutters. There are no affiliate links on this page, I have no ties to any of the companies mentioned…
I’ve put together a 300+ page book with basically everything I learned the hard way over the last 10 years founding and working at several hardware startups. It started out as a self published work, but No Starch Press picked it up and it went through a very extensive editing process to make it even better.
How I built a simple portable audio player for my boy, summoning the spirit of the Gameboy
Look, I'm an idiot. I know that, you know that, and the man on the moon knows that. Let's not get into why I'm an idiot; let's just accept that I have my peculiarities and you have yours. My idiocy is a quest to make sure all my portable electronics can recharge using USB-C. Modern smartwatches are tiny and they do a…
When I placed the last screw on the DB4 chassis of the Beautiful Silent PC [1] , I thought I would not have to open it up again for years. Perhaps, I hypothesized, it would be a decade before an upgrade. The beautiful silent PC. The imperative of working from home proved me wrong when the seemingly easy problem of…
Unfortunately, in the tech sector, just like many other sectors, there are scammers around. When you are dealing with electronics this is typically in the form of chips that have had their markings…
Listen, anyone can make a PCB at home, it’s easy. PCBs (printed circuit boards) are those flat things with all the components that are inside all electronic devices, you’ve seen them. All you need is a laser printer, some glossy magazine pages, print your circuit onto the page, use a clothes iron to transfer the toner…
Ever since I got AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question: What's the point? The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That's not much. Especially considering a modern desktop has at least one slot with 16 lanes of…
