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Box of Secrets: Discreetly modding an apartment intercom to work with Apple Home
Discreetly modding my friend’s apartment intercom to work with Apple Home.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 460 posts.
152
Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
This post is a high-level explainer for my Master’s thesis, which involves designing hardware architectures for ultrafast inference and online learning using the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) architecture. I’ll assume familiarity with standard machine learning concepts, as well as some understanding of hardware and…
153
IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
Collaboration aims to advance new technologies that expand infrastructure choice while preserving mission-critical environments ARMONK, N.Y., April 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today...
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eBay Restricts Listings of Radio Equipment, but Exempts Ham-Band-Only Gear
The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national association for amateur radio, connecting hams around the U.S. with news, information and resources.
155
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)…
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It's the memory latency, stupid
When your database CPU is at 100%, what is it actually doing? Memory stalls, CPU caches, and how radix partitioning makes GROUP BY faster.
158
The Forgetful CPU (Linux on M4)
This blog post goes into quite some detail about how I first booted Linux on my M4 Mac mini. I encourage you to look up terms and concepts you don’t know, since I cannot explain all the background in this post ;)
159
Two computers, one monitor, zero fiddling (2025)
How to switch inputs between desktop and laptop on one monitor using built-in KVM and DDC
160
An ESP32 based plane radar for my desk
Plane radar is a neat little project that pulls nearby ADS-B traffic, plots each aircraft by distance and bearing, and shows the details directly on a cute little screen.
161
New iPad mini
Apple unveils the all-new iPad mini, featuring an OLED display in a thinner design, a leap in performance with A20 Pro, and water and dust resistance.
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Why E cores make Apple silicon fast
Apple silicon architecture is designed to get background processes out of the way of our apps running in the foreground, by using the E cores.
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I built my own hair electrolysis machine
Axiom: body hair is cringe. That's how I feel, at least. I decided to build a machine that lets me permanently remove it using electricity.
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A beginner's guide to split keyboards
Come to the dark side, we have keyboard shaped cookies.
169
Camera Chase Vehicle
You stumble on a weird robot chassis in an industrial warehouse. Its adorable, enormous and will likely be scrapped.
170
Codex Hacked a Samsung TV
We gave Codex a foothold. It popped a root shell.
171
Using AI to reverse engineer hardware
After my mother passed away I ended up with a big box full of old film negatives containing photos from childhood family trips and similar. So I decided to buy a negative photo scanner and found that the Plustek 8200i was supported under Linux so I bought that. Only to discover that the chipset in...
172
The intracies of modern camera lens repair (2024)
I stumbled across a broken Sigma 45mm f/2.8 Art lens for a very cool $58.65 USD that I simply could not resist. I've been eyeing an AF lens in the 50mm range for my recent endeavors with L-mount cameras and this looked like the perfect fit. This lens is commonly found as a kit with the very excellent full-frame Sigma…
173
Unlocking a locked/deactivated e-waste Cricut Maker
How I returned a Cricut Maker back to service after Cricut remotely bricked the unit
174
Notes on Apple's Nano Texture (2025)
2024 Nano Texture Macbook Pro on the left; 2021 Glossy Macbook Pro on the right TLDR: the Nano Texture performs wonderfully anywhere where light used to be a factor and used to force me to shade my screen or avoid the place entirely. I’m less concerned with where I sit indoors. Coffee shops / offices with skylights or…
175
Raspberry Pi's New AI Hat Adds 8GB of RAM for Local LLMs
Today Raspberry Pi launched their new $130 AI HAT+ 2 which includes a Hailo 10H and 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM. With that, the Hailo 10H is capable of running LLMs entirely standalone, freeing the Pi's CPU and system RAM for other tasks. The chip runs at a maximum of 3W, with 40 TOPS of INT8 NPU inference performance in…
176
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.
177
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…
178
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:
179
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...
180
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.