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Building a TB-303 from Scratch
Code music in the browser.
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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 460 posts.
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The "Windows XP Box" (2003)
I needed a small Windows XP machine and a Mini-ITX board was the obvious choice. So I decided to build my "Windows XP Box" in a Windows XP box. The external dimensions of the box are a tiny 243mm x 200mm x 48mm.
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Every single board computer I tested in 2025
I benchmarked 15 SBCs released in 2025 across every price point. Here's what stood out, what disappointed, and what the year looked like for single board computers.
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How my e-reader lost its stripes
I’ve been a lifelong reader, which has proved a fragile habit in our era of endless trivial distraction. While books and e-ink readers solve the problem of competition for attention, they can’t compete with a phone for convenience. That tiny device in my pocket has made reading both easier and more vulnerable to…
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BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
+++ BMW Group bringing Physical AI to Europe +++ Pilot project at BMW Group Plant Leipzig +++ New “Center of Competence for Physical AI in Production” accelerates global integration of AI and robotics in production +++ First pilot deployment of humanoid robots successfully completed at BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, USA…
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My DIY FPGA board can run Quake II
kind of a blog
217
Ternary Bonsai: Top Intelligence at 1.58 Bits
Today, we’re announcing Ternary Bonsai, a new family of 1.58-bit language models designed to balance strict memory constraints with high accuracy requirements.
218
Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools
This frame of Screamer 2 was rendered not by an original 3dfx card and not by an emulator, but by an FPGA reimplementation of the Voodoo 1 that I wrote in SpinalHDL. Available on GitHub .
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China DRAM Maker CXMT Targets $4.2B IPO as It Takes on Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron
Chinese memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) has filed for an IPO on Shanghai's STAR Market, seeking to raise up to CNY 295 billion (about USD 42.2 billion) to upgrade DRAM manufacturing, advance next-generation memory technologies, and strengthen China’s position in the global memory supply chain.
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Print with dozens of colors: Our new open-source ColorMix for PrusaSlicer
For the past few months, the 3D printing community has been poking at a very interesting question: what if a multi-material printer were not limited to the colors physically loaded on it? And we must say it right now: This is a...
221
Mo RAM, Mo Problems (2025)
As a retro-computer enthusiast, it seems that parts are either insanely expensive or dirt cheap. If the first case has obvious problems, the second can also lead to issues.
222
The Orange Pi 6 Plus
This was a long one–I spent a fair bit of time with the Orange Pi 6 Plus over the past few months, and what I expected to be a quick look at another fast ...
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What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
Once in a while new hardware is released that makes a difference. Such a device is the Intel Optane series of high-performance SSD’s for professional use, which was released in late 2017. In this case I’m talking about the Intel Optane P4800X and P5800X and their consumer counterparts ( 900P and 905P ). All drives are…
224
Running Kimi K3 on MI355X at Better Performance per Dollar Than B300
Running Kimi K3 at ~952 tok/s/node, AMD continues to prove its case as the winner in performance per dollar.
225
Photon-Emission-Guided Laser Fault Injection Enables RP2350 Secure Debug
Differential photon-emission microscopy localized debug enable register activity and narrowed the laser search before SWD-guided injection set the two bits required to restore Secure debug on an RP2350 A4.
226
Raspberry Pi Drag Race: Pi 1 to Pi 5 – Performance Comparison
Today we're comparing one of each generation of Pi from the Pi 1 to the Pi 5 to see how their performance and specifications have improved.
227
Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6
Gemini Robotics ER 1.6 upgrades spatial reasoning and multi-view understanding, unlocking new capabilities like instrument reading for autonomous robots.
228
Don't you mean extinct?
In 1993, Jurassic Park came out and revolutionized the use of CGI in films [1] . To the public the experience was magic. But for some of the people in the movie industry, it was a rude awakening.
229
Getting 50 GB/S Back from the Apple Neural Engine
An RTL performance erratum in the Apple M3 Neural Engine throttles DRAM weight streaming throughput down to 17–19 GB/s from the nominal 45–60 GB/s, whenever the total weight size is an integer multiple of 1 MiB, which currently affects 7 of ANEMLL ’s 15 models. Avoiding the problematic path in the kernel DMA engine's…
230
My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable
It turns out that a _very_ long HDMI cable, a Steam Controller 2 and Bazzite on a second drive was all I needed to get a comfortable couch gaming experience.
231
Triton: DirectX 11 Driver for QEMU
In the prequel, we introduced Neptune, a Direct3D protocol forwarding layer for VirtIO. Neptune allowed us to serialize Direct3D API calls across the hypervisor boundary and this allowed us to run Wine games on a Linux guest with a Linux host faster than with DXVK directly in the guest. Admittedly, the payoff there…
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Qwen-Robot Suite: A Foundation Model Suite for Physical World Intelligence
Qwen offers comprehensive functionality spanning chatbot, image and video understanding, image generation, document processing, web search integration, tool utilization, and artifacts.
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Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s
Meet the RNGD Server, delivering scalable, energy-efficient AI inference at data center scale with FuriosaAI’s Renegade accelerator platform.
235
Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test
Discover the Apple iPhone 18 Pro exceptional camera performance with a score of 172, featuring improved dynamic range, stabilization, and variable aperture.
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Turning a dumb AC unit smart (without losing my security deposit)
TL;DR: DIY home automation is ezpz with nothing more than a stepper motor, an esp32, and a high tolerance for Jank. My rental apartment’s AC unit can only be controlled using these retro-looking analog knob-based controls, mounted right onto the unit. No separate wall-mounted thermostat, no remote…
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My Snapdragon Dev Kit was healthy and working fine until a Windows update failed
My personal website and blog
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My Favourite Laptop
I’m not a big owner of things, but the best laptop I’ve ever owned is a roughed-up 2015 Thinkpad X250.
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Build your own Dial-up ISP with a Raspberry Pi
Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs1. It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11…