Topics /

Hardware & Electronics

The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.

Any year
2797

More fun with Apple's internal tools: creating a PDS card

In my last post , I figured out how to use Apple’s leaked Flasher utility from the 1990s to reflash a ROM SIMM inside of my Performa 630. It’s basically the Mac equivalent of a BIOS update, but only for Apple’s developers. The research involved in that post was quite a journey of reverse engineering from both a…

2801

Everything about the state of the Mac

Updates: October 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , November 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 18 , 22 , 27 , December 2 , 5 , 12 , 13 , 27 , January 2 , 5 , 5 , 9 , 11 , 13 , 22 , February 2 , 19 , March 15 , 17 , 21 , 22 , 28 , April 3 , 5 , 6 , 12 , 20 , 23 , May 3 , 6 , 19 , June 4 , July 27 …

2804

The FPGA turns 40

This year marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most exciting and interesting aspects of electronic engineering: the FPGA. The first commercially viable FPGA introduced in 1985 was the Xilinx XC2064, which provided developers with 64 configurable logic blocks, each with a three-input look-up tables. From tiny…

2808

Alexa leaks private wishlists

This morning, my wife noticed that Alexa was insistently flashing its little blue lights. "Alexa... Notifications?" "You have one notification. An item on your wishlist has dropped in price. The … is now only £…" And that's how my wife found out what I planned to get her for her birthday! What happened to cause this?…

2809

My deep learning rig (2022)

A lot of people have asked about the computers I used to train TorToiSe. I’ve been meaning to snap some pictures, but it’s never “convenient” to turn these servers off so I keep procrastinating. We had some severe thunderstorms today here i

2810

Magic Leap Review Part I

I have been studying the Magic Leap One (ML1) for a few weeks, taking over 1,000 photos and making many measurements. I’m bursting with things I want to talk about, so I am planning to releas…

2811

Debugging bare-metal STM32 from the seventh level of hell

Here’s a not-so-brief story about troubleshooting a problem that was at times vexing, impossible, incredibly challenging, frustrating, and all around just a terrible time with the bare-metal STM32G4 firmware for the moteus brushless motor controller. Background First, some things for context: moteus has a variety of…