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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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How encryption for Cinema Movies works
The Cinema Industry is using its own standards for creating and distributing movies in a secure way. The DCI (Digital Cinema Initiatives) specification defines everything from file formats and encryption to the projection systems itself.
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Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more. I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too.
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New two-factor authenticator: Commodore 64
Multi-factor authentication is ripe for disruption. SMS 2FA is inherently defective. Phone authenticators get stolen. Security tokens get lo...
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A new day for Insteon
We are a small group of passionate Insteon users that have successfully acquired Insteon. Like many of you, our homes are powered by Insteon’s amazing dual-mesh technology and highly configurable products. Most of you discovered that the Insteon Hubs began coming back online. Our first priority was getting the hubs on
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Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
I own a very old ‘flat’ screen television from 2009. One of the reason this TV is still kicking around is because I have a strange sentimental affection for it. Another is that I have written automation for it that works really well and it would be a pain to migrate away from it.
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Our LLM-controlled office robot can't pass butter
Can LLMs control robots? We answer this by testing how good models are at passing the butter – or more generally, do delivery tasks in a household setting. State of the art models struggle, with the best model scoring 40% at Butter-Bench, compared to 95% for humans.
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Beating Jeff's 3.14 Ghz Raspberry Pi 5
Jeff came up against a 1V limit in his video " Overclocking Raspberry Pi 5 to 3.14 GHz on Pi Day " after firmware was released to remove the 3Ghz limit.
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Reverse-engineering the Intel 8086's instruction register
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop an...
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Building a panel out of e-ink electronic shelf labels
A blog post on building a panel with multiple electronic shelf labels (ESL).
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Learning about PCI-e: Driver and DMA
Creating a simple driver for a simple PCI-e device (in QEMU)
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Making a smart bike dumb so it works again
My smart bike company went bankrupt, so I added a physical button to turn the light on/off
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Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
Device tree files point to a Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W with the Pi 4’s BCM2711 chip and a cut-down Pi 4 Model A.
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I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone
I built a small tool that turns my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper, so I can read my favorite blogs on a pocket e-reader instead of my phone.
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Homebrew Cray-1A
As part two ( see previous attempt ) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking…
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Building a TB-303 from Scratch
Code music in the browser.
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The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
I started a new job recently so I had the opportunity to get one of the new M1 MacBooks, I decided to go with the Air. The reviews have been very positive and I’m here to tell you: it is indeed an amazing device. The performance feels a lot better than my MacBook Pro 16”, which is only a year old and about 3x the…
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AirPods get stuck in low-quality 16 kHz audio mode when starting a VM
I always love when I find a really dumb solution that works reliably to fix a problem that should never really be a problem in the first place. But having worked with audio devices before—though nothing nearly as complex as the AirPods—I am willing to cut Apple some slack in building a seamless aural experience with…
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Nvidia H100 GPUs: Supply and Demand
This post is an exploration of the supply and demand of GPUs, particularly Nvidia H100s.
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Linux on a 486SX
Linux on a 486SX A year or two ago, I came into posession of a 1993 Compaq Presario 425. It's a Mac-ish all-in-one with a 14" color (S?)VGA screen capable of 800x600 in full 256-color glory. On the inside it features a 25MHz i486SX (the sort without a floating-point unit), paired with 20MB of RAM - a significant…
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How to pick a microcontroller
Revisiting some opinions on how to pick a microcontroller - as a followup to SnapEDA's post on the Top 10 Microcontrollers on their site.
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DIY Amps: A Roadmap for Beginners (2017)
So you have decided to take the DIY dive and start building your own headphone amplifiers! If you stick with it, you are going to learn a lot about audio and electronics theory and develop several …
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Low Cost CO2 Sensors Comparison: Photo-Acoustic vs. NDIR
A comparison of low-cost CO2 sensor technologies, explaining photo-acoustic versus NDIR designs and the tradeoffs behind each approach.