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Hardware & Electronics

The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 298 posts.

2019
167

A DIY Cruise Missile (2004)

I'd like to thank all those who have emailed me with their opinions, condemnations and support. The fact that I get so many emails obviously means that my goal of raising public awareness is working. Instead of answering the same questions and restating my perspectives repeatedly, I've been talked into writing a book…

168

Unsung Beauty of Analog Devices Datasheets

Engineers build stuff. They need to put together complex systems, most often from pieces that others have built. I jokingly talk to my colleagues that software engineering is similar to plumbing - take various pieces of software and link them through an interface (API or in case of real plumbing - connectors,

169

Adventures Building a Self-Driving RC Car

Having read some amazing books on Machine Learning, I had been looking for opportunities to apply ML from first principles in the real world. That was what got me curious about the wonderful Donkey Car project. The project is essentially a how-to guide to building your own RC car which can drive itself around a track…

171

New chips for machine intelligence

This note summarises details of some of the new silicon chips for machine intelligence. Its aim is to distil the most important implementation and architectural details (at least those that are currently available), to highlight the main differences between them. I’m focusing on chips designed for training since they…

172

Slimbook collaborates with the PowerPC laptop

We are pleased to announce our collaboration with Power Progress Community (PPC), the association behind the creation of a ordenador portátil con procesador PowerPC , in this case the NXP T2080. The PowerPC instruction set has been recently released by IBM as open source and given to the Linux Foundation.

174

Solving the Rubik’s cube with a robot hand

We’ve trained a pair of neural networks to solve the Rubik’s Cube with a human-like robot hand. The neural networks are trained entirely in simulation, using the same reinforcement learning code as OpenAI Five paired with a new technique called Automatic Domain Randomization (ADR). The system can handle situations it…

180

Adventures in reverse engineering Broadcom NIC firmware

For some time now, I've been reverse engineering the firmware of the Broadcom BCM5719 Ethernet NIC chip, so that open source firmware can be produced for it. The BCM5719 is a PCIe chip which provides up to four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and is mainly intended for use in server applications. It can be used with the Linux…