Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 93 posts.

Hardware & Electronics
61

Designing and building a keyboard

Some years ago, I wanted to make a Nixie Tube clock from scratch. PCB manufacture was so expensive that I ended up just making the PCBs by hand. I figured I would give the market another look, and dang has custom PCB manufacture become cheap! The best/easiest service that I found was OSH Park. I'd never had PCBs made…

88

An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator

A very warm welcome to my most ambitious project to date. In this project I’m going to attempt to design and build a sprite-based graphics accelerator that will function as a co-processor to an MCU. Using cheap off-the-shelf components I’m hoping to achieve a level of gaming performance that compares well to popular…