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How many x86 instructions are there?
It’s surprisingly hard to give a good answer (the question was raised in this article). It depends on how you count, and the details are interesting (to me anyway). To not leave you hanging: …
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A Practical Guide to Lasers for Experimenters and Hobbyists
However, many others have contributed in one form or another (newsgroup postings, email, laser parts, etc.). They are cited in the Acknowledgments and/or in the individual sections which contain their material. And, by the way, the name: "Sam's Laser FAQ" was more or less created by those who have read and commented…
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FreeRTOS meets Rust
The Rust ecosystem has made some cool progress on the embedded development front since my last article . Let’s take a look how we can build a much more ergonomical and safe API to one of the more popular real time operating systems - FreeRTOS - with a full testing and continous integration setup.
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Amazon Dash Button's Wireless Audio Configuration
Update: I’ve learned a bit more and as such, see the bottom of the post for an update. I’ve been slow to update this but now that it’s seeming to be gaining a lot of traffic (lead…
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Jailbreak firmware turns cheap digital walkie-talkie into DMR scanning receiver
In the last years, DMR and MOTOTRBO (a.k.a. TRBO a Motorola Solutions branded DMR Radios ) has become a very popular digital voice mode on the UHF and VHF bands and the MD380 radio is the latest cheap DMR walkie-talkie to come out of China. The question is, is it any good? The longer answer is…
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto, Day 6: Fixed a chip, data read from disk
In today's Xerox Alto restoration session we investigated why the disk drive isn't working and found a failed chip. With this chip repaire...
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Tiny Lisp Computer
This article describes a self-contained computer with its own display and keyboard interface, based on an ATmega328, that you can program in Lisp. You can use it to run programs that interface to components such as LEDs and push-buttons via the I/O pins, read the analogue inputs, and operate external devices via the…
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The Untouchables – Apple’s new OS “activation” for Touch Bar MacBook Pros
Last week Joe Chilcote discovered an interesting message when imaging a Late 2016 MacBook Pro TouchBar (from here on out referred to as TBP): A critical software update is required for your Mac. To…
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Hacking industrial vehicles from the internet
It is possible to monitor and control float trucks, public bus or delivery vans from the internet , obtaining their speed, position, and a lot other parameters. You can even control some parameters of the vehicle or hack into the canbus of the vehicle remotely.
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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 4: What's running on the system
This post describes our continuing efforts to restore a Xerox Alto. We checked that the low-level microcode tasks are running correctly a...
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$99 Mineserver: The Devil Is in the Details
An update on my kids' Mineserver project
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data
In the previous Xerox Alto restoration session , we got the disk working, but the system didn't boot. After much investigation, I discove...
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Multiple cameras and motion detection on the Raspberry Pi
Learn how to access *multiple cameras* (including USB webcams and the Raspberry Pi camera module) using your Raspberry Pi, Python, and OpenCV.
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Macbook charger teardown: Complexity inside Apple's power adapter (2015)
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
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Pine64 (64-bit quad core for $15) Quick Start Guide
RayHightower.com - Tech company founder. Commercial real estate investor. Building teams, software, and companies. Located in Phoenix, AZ, USA.
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NESPi – Mini NES Classic Raspberry Pi Games Console
My blog about making and modding, 3D printing, electronics and other experiments.
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My Raspberry Pi cluster
So I accidentally ordered too many Raspberry Pi's. Therefore, I built a small cluster out of them. I thought I'd write up a parts list for o...
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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 3: Inside the disk drive
I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto — a legendary minicomputer from 1973 that helped set the direction for personal computing. This post desc...
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Magic Leap – Separating Magic and Reality
The Goal – Explain What is Magic Leap Doing Magic Leap has a way of talking about what they hope to do someday and not necessarily what they can do anytime soon. Their patent applications ar…
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Where's my petabyte disk drive?
Fourteen years ago I noted that disk drives were growing so fast I couldn’t fill them up. Between 1997 and 2002, storage capacity doubled every year, allowing me to replace a 3 gigabyte drive with a new 120 gigabyte model. I wrote:
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ODROID-C2 Compared to Raspberry Pi 3 and Orange Pi Plus
tl;dr: The ODROID-C2 is a very solid competitor to the Raspberry Pi model 3 B, and is anywhere from 2-10x faster than the Pi 3, depending on the operation. The software and community support is nowhere near what you get with the Raspberry Pi, but it's the best I've seen of all the Raspberry Pi clones I've tried. The…
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3D Printed Camera
The design of the camera body evolved from a simplified massing of functional elements to refinements based on ergonomics and scale, as I learned more about the strength of the material.