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Hardware & Electronics

The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.

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Power consumption of Game Boy flash cartridges

Flash cartridges (= "carts") are commonly used to run Game Boy ROMs, such as homebrew games or dumped officially released games, on real hardware. Different kinds of flash carts with various features and performance characteristics have been available for a long time, but flash carts have in general the reputation of…

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Getting Started in Robotics

People sometimes ask me for robotics resources. There aren’t many high quality internet-first lists available on this topic, so I made one I can link to. I’ll continually update this list so feel free to give suggestions if things are missing or you have better links .

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Drilling down on Uncle Sam's proposed TP-Link ban

The U.S. government is reportedly preparing to ban the sale of wireless routers and other networking gear from TP-Link Systems , a tech company that currently enjoys an estimated 50% market share among home users and small businesses. Experts say while the proposed ban may have more to do with TP-Link’s ties to China…

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Building Ultra Long Range Toslink

This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 38th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2024. You can watch the talk that was recorded by the wonderful C3VOC team below if that’s your preferred medium:

1275

I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome

So this past week has been quite a whirlwind — we wrapped up the Novena campaign and smashed all our stretch goals, concluding with over $700k raised , and I got my hair cut in a bar at midnight by none other than the skilled hands of Lenore of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories ( I blame Jake ! :). It was an…

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80386 microcode disassembled

After I posted 8086 microcode disassembled , Ken Shirriff sent me a high-resolution image of the microcode ROM from the 80386. I didn’t expect I would ever do anything with it for a couple of reasons: one is that it’s absolutely huge (94720 bits) compared to the 8086 one (10752 bits) so (even with bitract or similar)…