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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 459 posts.
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Proper decoupling capacitor practices, and why you should leave 100nF behind
Ever wondered why 100nF is a go-to value for decoupling capacitors? This number has pervaded in datasheets and electronics advice going back to the 1980s, and is still widely present in the datashe…
213
Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels Apple’s quality is degrading. I spend 10 hours a day on my laptop and would spend any amount of money within reason for a better one. However, everything comes with tradeoffs.
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ESP32 Undocumented Bluetooth Commands: Clearing the Air
The developer resources in just one place!
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Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb
Some broadcast engineering tasks are a bit too daunting for me to consider. Climbing the massive towers that power radio and TV stations is one of them! Your browser does not support the video tag. Recently, local engineer Aaron Cox had the perfect set of conditions for a drone flight to capture some of that risk, as…
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Milwaukee M18 Battery Reverse Engineering
2023-01-01: This project has been ongoing for a while... now its time to post some of this info and see what comes of it. I have access to several junk Milwaukee M18 batteries. Age varies a little. I thought it would be 'fun' to reverse engineer a battery just to see how it functions... That is until I actually opened
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My fan worked fine, so I gave it WiFi
How I went about creating a concealed modification for a fan so I could control it over WiFi with ESPHome and Home Assistant.
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Unusual circuits in the Intel 386's standard cell logic
I've been studying the standard cell circuitry in the Intel 386 processor recently. The 386, introduced in 1985, was Intel's most complex pr...
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Gate-level simulation of ASIC in browser
TinyTapeout VGA 1D Cellular Automata Simulation
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Running Unsupported iOS on Deprecated Devices
Earlier this year I demoed iOS 6 running on an iPod touch 3 - a device that Apple never gave iOS 6 to, making iOS 5.1.1 the latest build it can run
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Negotiating PoE+ Power in the Pre‑Boot Environment
Solving a boot-time power challenge on PoE+ x86 systems by creating our own UEFI app to handle LLDP power negotiation at the firmware level, allowing our machines to request higher power from network switches before the OS loads.
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OrthoRoute – GPU-accelerated autorouting for KiCad
OrthoRoute: GPU-Accelerated PCB Autorouter
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iPad Pro with M5 chip
Apple today introduced the new iPad Pro with M5, delivering a huge boost in performance and taking the next big leap in AI for iPad.
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Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
It has been 0 days since the last change to my home server.
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Comparing the power consumption of a 30 year old refrigerator to a new one
Having a home server and a few smart plugs leads to interesting data points like this one. Well, interesting to me, at least.
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Does showing seconds in the system tray actually use more power?
Welcome to LTT Labs - your go-to destination for all things tech. Explore comprehensive test results, insightful commentary, and the latest analysis in hardware.
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Gemini Robotics On-Device brings AI to local robotic devices
We’re introducing an efficient, on-device robotics model with general-purpose dexterity and fast task adaptation.
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Infinite Grid of Resistors
There is a well-known puzzle based on the premise of an �infinite� grid of resistors connecting adjacent nodes of a square lattice. A small portion of such a grid is illustrated below.
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A vending machine, on the internet
These days, every new business seems to be a SaaS. I remember when software worked differently: you bought it, installed it, and used it without having to create an account, remember a password, or even connect to the internet. Your data lived on your C drive, and you were in control. Software was a tool, like a…
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Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC
Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC: In the past 18 months, we have been working on an ARM notebook based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X1 Elite SoC (X1E). At this point, we are putting the project on hold. There are several ...
231
Building my childhood dream PC
In 1993, I was 14 and already passionate about computers [1] . That year my mother managed to buy a PC for the household. That was quite an effort for a single mother. My brother Aurelien and I spent every waking hour on this machine, staying up all night on weekends.
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Cheap DIY solar fence design
A year ago I installed a 4 kilowatt solar fence . I'm revisiting it this Sun Day , to share the design, now that I have prooved it out.
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All about automotive lidar
A comprehensive overview of automotive lidar technology — what lidar measures, how it measures distance, and how it determines bearing.
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CM0 – A new Raspberry Pi you can't buy
This little postage stamp is actually a full Raspberry Pi Zero 2, complete with eMMC storage and WiFi. But you can't get one. Well, not unless you buy the CM0NANO development board from EDAtec, or you live in China. This little guy doesn't have an HDMI port, Ethernet, or even USB. It's a special version of the…
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I made a floppy disk from scratch
Polymatt decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did. I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one of these things
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USB On-The-Go
USB, the Universal Serial Bus, was first released in 1996. It did not achieve widespread adoption until some years later; for most of the '90s RS-232-ish serial and its awkward sibling the parallel port were the norm for external peripheral. It's sort of surprising that USB didn't take off faster, considering the…
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Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
A short review and troubleshooting guide.
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Bought myself an Ampere Altra system
There are tools and there are toys. I bought myself a tool.
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I made a 10¢ MCU Talk
I taught a 10¢ CH32V003 RISC‑V MCU to talk. By bit-banging PWM as a DAC and using a tiny 2‑bit ADPCM decoder, I squeezed ~6–7 seconds of recognizable audio into 16 KB of flash. Then I went full ret...