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Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.
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The Confusing World of USB
For decades, my perception of USB was that of a technology both simple and reliable. You plug it and it works. The two first iterations [1] [2] freed PCs from a badly fragmented connector world made of RJ-45 (Ethernet), DA-15 (Joystick), DE-9 (Serial), DIN (PS/2), SCSI, and DB-25 (Parallel). When USB-3.0 came out…
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Nokia 5110 – Back from the Dead (2022)
I loved my Nokia 5110 and I wonder if it was possible to breathe new life into this long-shelved and still-memed mobile phone. As it turns out, not only is it possible, but it's going to be a lot easier than I anticipated.
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FPGAs Have the Wrong Abstraction for Computing
Verilog is the de facto abstraction for programming today’s FPGAs. RTL programming is fine if you want to use FPGAs for their traditional purpose as circuit emulators, but it’s not the right thing for the new view of FPGAs as general-purpose computational accelerators.
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Repurposing an old Android phone as a web server
A programmer's blog with posts about Ruby, web development, algorithms and data structure.
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Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM
My micro site, zero.btxx.org , is being served to the public internet from a Raspberry Pi Zero v1.3 running Alpine Linux.
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Librem 5 dev kits are shipping
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
Now that we’ve covered the contenders for this test, I will cover how this test will be performed and go through the results. It was a long time for me, but for you, it’ll just be a few…
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iPhone 6 Screens Demystified
Articles about PaintCode's new features, interviews, application development topics.
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Voder Speech Synthesizer
A web emulation of Bell Labs VODER speech synthesizer from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair.
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Hosting a website on an 8-bit microcontroller
My victim is the AVR64DD32 which is quite similar to the Atmega328 of Arduino fame. Compared to the older Atmega, these AVR DD lines are cheaper for the same memory, use a single programming pin and have nicer peripherals:
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My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4
I have been using a MacBook Pro M4 as my portable computer for the last half a year and wanted to share a few short impressions. As always, I am not a professional laptop reviewer, so in this article you won’t find benchmarks, just subjective thoughts!
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Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?
It wasn't my intent to have this next post be about locating a source of a transmitter - but the temptation proved irresistible. Over the pa...
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The Heart of RISC-V Development Is Unmatched
Today, SiFive introduces the new HiFive platform for professional RISC-V developers, the HiFive Unmatched! The HiFive Unmatched enables developers to create the RISC-V-based software they need for RISC-V platforms. From real-time operating systems to custom Linux distributions, and the compilers, libraries, and…
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The quiet resurgence of RF engineering
I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it wa...
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A 60 GHz phased array for $10
In 2018, I gave an talk at Hackaday Supercon that was basically Phased Arrays 101. You can watch it at the bottom of this post.
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The “terrible” 3 cent MCU – a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers
Like many others, I was quite amazed to learn about a microcontroller sold for only 0.03 USD via the EEVblog last year. How was this possible? Many assumed this was a fire sale of an old product. D…
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NEON is the new black: fast JPEG optimization on ARM servers
Cloudflare's jpegtran implementation was optimized for Intel CPUs. Now that we intend to integrate ARMv8 processors, new optimizations for those are required.
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Designing an Ethernet Switch ASIC
Designing the world's first open source Ethernet switch ASIC. An unmanaged cut-through 3-port 100Mbps switch fabbed on Global Foundries 180 nm.
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Heat Pumps Work Miracles
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 6 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook. ]
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Down the ergonomic keyboard rabbit hole
Over the past few months I've had an ergonomic keyboard obsession. It started out simple, just wanting to improve my typing experience. It ended with me writing a driver. This is my story - now available as an audiobook!
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The Sad Saga of Purism and the Librem 5
Today I’m going to tell you a sad tale of a device called the Librem 5 and the company behind it, Purism. As of right now, this story does not have a happy ending. I am writing this series of articles as a protest against the behavior of Purism, a company which claims that transparency and openness are their core…
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The ReMarkable Tablet: A Review
The reMarkable tablet is a 10" e-paper tablet on which you can read PDF and ePub files, and write on with the stylus that comes with the device. It has fundamentally changed how I read textbooks.
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Transforming a QLC SSD into an SLC SSD
In today's article, we're embarking on something unprecedented! We'll guide you step by step through the process of transforming an SSD equipped with QLC NANDs into an SLC SSD, significantly enhancing its durability and overall performance!
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Is Arm ready for server dominance?
AWS announced new servers with Arm-powered Graviton2 processors. How do they stack up vs. x86-powered instances, and is Arm ready for server domination?