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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 460 posts.
Smart TVs are everywhere! But who is the master? Amid the electronics boom driven by A.I., one piece of electronics has remained almost unchanged financially. That is the digital display or flat-panel monitor. With good reason! The entire entertainment and streaming industry wants one of these devi
In November, my friend and fellow Recurser, Frank , picked up an arcade machine for the Recurse Center . We call it the RCade. He wanted to leave the original CRT in - which I think is a great choice! - and drove it off of a Raspberry Pi. Eventually we wanted to move to a more powerful computer, but we needed a way to…
Gauntlet now has a case, it's 3D printed and there's a few bits I need to adjust, but for a first go I'm really pleased…
ESP32-S31 delivers comprehensive multi-protocol connectivity, rich multimedia interfaces, and hardware-accelerated security for next-generation IoT applications.
Software is now a commodity thanks to Claude Code. So the next step is obviously hardware. I spent the last 6 months on building a hardware startup, which was fucking hard.
That cheapo cable you bought online? Probably a counterfeit. We x-rayed a suspicious cable to show you exactly what that means, and why counterfeits work worse and wear out faster.
Buy an RTX 5090, the fastest consumer GPU money can buy, and you get 104.8 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. Ask it to do double-precision math and you get 1.64 TFLOPS. That 64:1 gap is not a technology limitation. For fifteen years, the FP64:FP32 ratio has been slowly getting wider on consumer GPUs, widening the divide between…
Passive radar is radar that doesn't need a transmitter; it uses existing broadcasts of opportunity.
How does Intel's new Arc Pro B70 32GB professional GPU stack up against the competition in media editing, rendering, AI, CAD, and BIM applications?
Our house has a box room, full of boxes that we still haven’t unpacked from our last move. A couple of weeks ago something in that room started intermittently beeping. …
According to the Apple support document How to identify the DFU port on Mac , the DFU (device firmware update) port location for MacBook Pro models with Apple silicon is as follows:
My blog about my project cars and other contraptions
Chronicles of a bad idea. Or how I designed a systolic array with in-silicon debug infrastructure from scratch in under two weeks, and taped it out on Global Foundry 180 nm though a Tiny Tapeout experimental shuttle.
The challenges around porting Linux to an old videogame console by Atari
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.
The killer app for the 486 didn't come out until a year or so later
With its new design, E Ink Kaleido 4 supports a broader range of digital content. Compared to the previous generation, E Ink Kaleido 4 doubles its color gamut volume to more than 40K, increases white reflectance by 15%, and improves contrast by 50%. Additionally, with the introduction of new algorithms, E Ink Kaleido…
Companies form strategic partnership to dramatically advance and accelerate semiconductor innovation News Highlights: Companies sign multi-year agreement to collaborate as preferred partners to...
I've spent the last month adding features and improving performance in z486_MiSTer , mostly working through games from the first half of the 1990s. Looking a few years ahead brought me to another change I wanted to explore: the arrival of 3D graphics cards.
I purchased a Matrix CoolRunner Rev D back in 2017. This little chip is called a glitcher and it’s a type of modchip. Its sole purpose, the reason it was designed, is to deliver a short pulse of energy (~ 100 nanoseconds) to an Xbox 360 Console.
I built a scriptable 3D game engine for the Nintendo DS so you can write and run games directly on the console itself. Written in C using libnds , it compiles to a 100KB .nds ROM that runs at 60 FPS . Features a touch-based code editor on the bottom screen and real-time 3D rendering on the top screen. Ships with a…
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window.
As it turns out, the Brother NC-8700w Command Console is more interesting than it first appears.
Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Sandia National Laboratory (in Albuquerque NM USA) began building the capacity to design, fab, and test IC’s at scale (packaging was handled by Fairchild and Allied Signal). Why would a National Laboratory need the capacity to do this? To provide components that were not…
In one of my classes I asked the question I was afraid to ask but I just needed the answer to: “Who is afraid of not getting a job after graduating?” About eighty percent of the 150 people in the room raised their hands. That is roughly 120 students answering, in one motion, that they […]
Porting a 2012 OpenCV paper to YOLOv8 and CoreML on iOS to score rifle shooting targets from a photo - replacing the brass-plug scoring gauge with on-device computer vision.
two school nights, a pile of bootloops and one homemade rom later, my mother's phone is still e-waste. just faster
I have a pen-plotter! It’s great. It’s like having a printer but slow and it breaks more often. I got it on eBay and it came sorta broken and I immediately spent the difference between what I paid and the price of new one fixing it. Now it’s fixed!
36 mechanical keyboards. Click. Type. Listen. From IBM Model M (1985) to modern thocky customs.
