Carbon nanotube transistors outperform silicon
For decades, scientists have tried to harness the unique properties of carbon nanotubes to create high-performance electronics that are faster or consume less power. Now, for the first time, University of Wisconsin–Madison materials engineers have created carbon nanotube transistors that outperform state-of-the-art…
New 8-megapixel camera board on sale at $25
One of your favourite add-ons, now available with higher resolution, image quality, colour fidelity and low-light performance, for the same price of $25.
Apple Remote Code Execution with Image Files
Vulnerabilities discovered by Tyler Bohan of Cisco Talos. Many of the wide variety of file formats are designed for specialized uses within specific industries. Apple offers APIs as interfaces to provide a definitive way to access image data for multiple image formats on the Apple OS X platform. Talos is
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...
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...
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…
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:
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…
Reconfigured Tesla coil aligns, electrifies materials from a distance
Rice University researchers use a modified Tesla coil to assemble nanoparticles into a wire from a distance. Their process, “Teslaphoresis,” may be used for the self-assembly of nano- and macro-scale materials.
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.
What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic one?
This blog post shows how to create a reliable and realistic-looking malicious USB key that can be used in a drop attack.
A VR Cycling Experience for $40
I’ve made an Arduino thing that can wirelessly talk to a mobile device over BLE and can now meter the revolutions of a wheel with an optical tachometer. I’m using these two hardware fea…
Inside Pascal: Nvidia 's Newest Computing Platform
At the 2016 GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced the new NVIDIA Tesla P100, the most advanced accelerator ever built. Based on the new NVIDIA Pascal GP100 GPU and…
Beamforming in PulseAudio
In case you missed it – we got PulseAudio 9.0 out the door , with the echo cancellation improvements that I wrote about . Now is probably a good time for me to make good on my promise to expand upon the subject of beamforming.
The 3DS Cryptosystem
I think one of the biggest challenge for system engineers is designing security. Recently, at the 32c3 conference, plutoo, derrek, and smea presented a series of hacks that completely defeated the security of the 3DS. As a result, people have implemented boot-time unsigned code execution (called “arm9loaderhax” in the…
Common definitions in chip design and production
Given how important chips are to modern society EVERYONE should understand and appreciate how they are made. Every field has its own set of terms, jargon, and acronyms (engineers love acronyms!). As you would expect, chip design is no different. If you are new to chip design, it might take you a few days to read…
Interpreting Analog Sticks
Development Blog
Building my $1,200 Hackintosh
I’ve wanted a new Mac for awhile now. Now I have one faster than almost any Mac that Apple can sell you. Here’s how I built it.
SSE: mind the gap
SSE and SSE2 are available in every single x86-family CPU with 64-bit support. You too can play around with SIMD, which is great fun! Unfortunately, SSE2 level in particular also happens to be what…
Restoring YC's Xerox Alto, day 1: Power supplies and disk interface
A few days ago, I wrote about how I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto for Y Combinator. This new post describes the first day of restoration...
I made a cheap home motion sensor and controller
After designing my first PCB , I went on a designing spree. It turns out that making PCBs (printed circuit boards, basically a piece of plastic that includes all the connections of your components in it. It helps make your project smaller and cut down on the amount of wires floating around) is so enjoyable, I’m PCBing…