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Mystery signal from a helicopter
I heard a mysterious sound in a Youtube video and started to investigate.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 144 posts.
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Quake on an oscilloscope
A summary of some problems I faced when tinkering with Quake to get it play nicely on an oscilloscope.
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What Hard Drive Should I Buy?
Get all of the latest cloud storage news and insights from Backblaze - the leading independent cloud storage provider.
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Building an open source Nest
Inspired by the Google acquisition of Nest for $3.2Bn, the Spark team set out to build an intelligent learning thermostat in less than 24 hours.
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Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps
Let’s end this debate once and for all. Humans can see frame rates greater than 24fps (although plenty of people will argue that they can’t on the internet). I’ll explain more in a future post if necessary, but let’s take that as read.
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A Motion-Sensing Keyboard
We present a new type of augmented mechanical keyboard, sensing rich and expressive motion gestures performed both on and directly above the device. A low-resolution matrix of infrared (IR) proximity sensors is interspersed with the keys of a regular mechanical keyboard. This results in coarse but high frame-rate…
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My Quest to Build the Ultimate Music Player
Over the past few years, I have been slowly but surely building my own music player. It's been a wild ride. The codebase has radically changed several times, but is always converging on a better music listening experience.
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How LEDs are Made
During the 2014 trip to China, our supplier YunSun was kind enough to pick us up in Shenzhen and give us a tour of their factory.
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Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
In June of 2010 I moved to a place in Montana with only electric heat. By myself. In the past few winters I had conducted experiments in cutting the amount of energy I needed to stay warm, with a focus on heating myself instead of heating the whole house.
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Can I drop a pacemaker 0day?
Can I drop a pacemaker 0day at DefCon that is capable of killing people? Computers now run our cars. It's now possible for a hacker to i...
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Crowdfunding the Novena Open Laptop
We’re launching a crowdfunding campaign around our Novena open hardware computing platform. Originally, this started as a hobby project to build a computer just for me and xobs – something that we would use every day, easy to extend and to mod, our very own Swiss Army knife. I’ve posted here a couple of times about…
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I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome
So this past week has been quite a whirlwind — we wrapped up the Novena campaign and smashed all our stretch goals, concluding with over $700k raised , and I got my hair cut in a bar at midnight by none other than the skilled hands of Lenore of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories ( I blame Jake ! :). It was an…
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Anatomy of a cheap USB-to-Ethernet adapter
Taking apart a very cheap USB to Ethernet adapter and pondering on the parts found inside.
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Hard disk hacking
Apart from this article, I also gave a talk at OHM2013 about this subject. The video of that talk (minus the first few minutes) is now online .
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Pre-orders start today for Flame, the Firefox OS developer phone
Update 2014-07-15: The pre-order period has ended and the Flame is now available as a standard order, with shipping in 7-10 days. The Firefox OS Flame reference device that we ...
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6 GHz frequency modulated radar
Making a cheap and simple radar with a range of about 100 meters.
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Chromebox, now for simpler and better meetings
[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog ] The best meetings are face-to-face—we can brainstorm openly, collaborate closely and make fa...
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68 Katy – 68000 Linux on a Solderless Breadboard
What does it take to build a little 68000-based protoboard computer, and get it running Linux? In my case, about three weeks of spare time, plenty of coffee, and a strong dose of stubborness. After banging my head against the wall with problems ranging from the inductance of pushbutton switches to memory leaks in the…