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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.
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Extreme debugging - a tale of microcode and an oven
It's been quite awhile since I debugged a computer program. Too long. Although I miss coding, the thing I miss more is the process of findin...
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The Apple Vision Pro’s missing apps
The Apple Vision Pro is missing some important apps, and it seems likely that Apple’s App Store policies played a part. Might the company respond by doubling down with Disney?
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The 2020 MacBook Air
Faster, cheaper, and now with a truly great keyboard.
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IBM unveils z-series with 5.5 GHz CPU and hardware transactional memory.
Learn about IBM's performance and progress to become a more innovative and focused company.
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How do you power a rocket engine?
This article discusses different types of rocket engine cycles, from pressure-fed through gas generator, to full-flow staged combustion.
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Junk drawer phone as a music streaming server
I wanted to get a music streaming server running as I have in the past but with the scarcity of RasberryPi’s my I needed to try something new. I had a Samsung Galaxy S7 that had been taking up space in my junk drawer and this post is my journey to give it a new task.
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New Ubuntu-based Precision line-up
Update: Precision 7520 and 7720 available as of March 28; Dell Precision 5720, a 27” All-in-One available as of April 18. Today I am excited to announce the next generation of our Ubuntu-based Pre…
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Reverse engineering ESP32 Wi-Fi driver: the road ahead
Estimating the effort needed to re-implement the Wi-Fi driver
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From Gongkai to Open Source
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a $12 “Gongkai” cell phone (pictured above) that I stumbled across in the markets of Shenzhen, China. My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping…
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Quick and dirty way to rip an eBook from Android
I recently purchased a book for my MSC which was only available via a crappy Android app. There was no obvious way to decrypt it to read on a more sensible device, so I resorted to the ancient art of screenscraping. This is a quick-and-dirty way to grab images of the pages and convert them to a standard PDF using…
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Can computers read through a book page by page without opening it?
A. R. Sanchez, B. Heshmat*, A. Aghasi, M. Zhang, S. Naqvi, J. Romberg, R. Raskar
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New laser ultrasound technique can remotely image the inside of a person
MIT researchers have produced the first “laser ultrasound” images in humans, using eye- and skin-safe lasers. The new technique enables noncontact ultrasound imaging, which may help clinicians to remotely assess patients, infants, and contact-sensitive subjects such as burn victims.
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An Update on AMD Processor Security
The AMD Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is the focal point for reporting potential product security issues to AMD. AMD PSIRT works with both the AMD internal product security team and the external product security ecosystem, including security researchers, industry peers, government organizations…
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Reverse engineering a restaurant pager system
Let's reverse engineer a restaurant pager system I bought off the internet!
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Where do interrupts happen?
Trying to determine exactly where asynchronous interrupts are delivered on Intel CPUs.
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I don't think the cheapest APC Back-UPS units can be monitored except in Windows
Despite otherwise seeming to work correctly, I can't monitor a Back-UPS BX1600MI in Linux without seeing a constant stream of spurious battery detach/reattach and power fail/restore events that last less than 2 seconds each. I've tried multiple computers and multiple UPSes of that model. It doesn't happen in their own…
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The iPhone's Last Stand?
Siri isn’t state of the art, but as long as it works — and it appears it does — it’s good enough for the consumer market.
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How do you move out of a smarthome?
I've an unhealthy amount of smart gadgets at home. Enough so that it's worth running an orientation session when friends come to visit. This is what the Alexa does, here's which light switches not to use, don't be scared if the Roomba attacks. That sort of thing. I don't know how long we'll live in this place. It's…
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What cracking open a Sonos One tells us about the Sonos IPO
I always find more truth about a company’s future buried in a company’s products. Long story short: I don’t have high hopes for Sonos’ trajectory. Here is why… For eight years, a war has been raging among a number of unlikely players. This bloodless technology battle is turning out to be one of the
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Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
The killer app for the 486 didn't come out until a year or so later
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DARPA wants to bypass the thermal middleman in nuclear power systems
Nuclear power already has an energy density advantage over other sources of thermal electricity generation. But what if nuclear generation didn’t require a steam turbine? What if the radiation from a reactor was less a problem to be managed and more a source of energy? And what if an energy conversion technology could…