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Learning about PCI-e: Driver and DMA
Creating a simple driver for a simple PCI-e device (in QEMU)
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Raspberry Pi boosts Pi 5 performance with SDRAM tuning
tl;dr Raspberry Pi engineers tweaked SDRAM timings and other memory settings on the Pi, resulting in a 10-20% speed boost at the default 2.4 GHz clock. I of course had to test overclocking, which got me a 32% speedup at 3.2 GHz! Changes may roll out in a firmware update for all Pi 5 and Pi 4 users soon. My quest for…
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Tenstorrent and the State of AI Hardware Startups
Semi-custom silicon is a bigger problem than Nvidia.
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They make USB-C cables with displays now
How to turn something as ordinary as an USB-C cable into something that a lot of nerds will want to buy.
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I replaced my son's school timetable app with an e-paper
How I replaced my son's school timetable app with an e-paper
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Hand Tracking for Mouse Input (2023)
The other day I saw the launch of Apple Vision Pro, the whole thing was very interesting, but one thing that caught my attention was the finger input. It seems very intuitive, by using the finger pinching as sort of like a cursor or mouse input. I figured I want to try it out, so I took it upon myself to create it.
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My MEGA65 is finally here
Taking a good look around (both inside and out) of my brand new MEGA65 computer system from Trenz Electronic GmbH.
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Running a Raspberry Pi with a read-only root filesystem
While there are downsides, using a read-only root filesystem will dramatically increase your Pi SD card's lifetime.
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The Hearts of the Super Nintendo
When I start studying a vintage system, the first thing I like to do is understand how its components work together at the hardware level [1] .
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Reverse-Engineering an IP Camera (2019)
A few days ago I had to replace the old IP camera I use to watch over my dogs and cats, and found out that IP cam technology changed a lot since I bought that old camera. IP cameras are now low-price and ubiquitous. I bought one of those generic models and installed it at my home, expecting to use the same software…
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New 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings
Raspberry Pi launched the 2 gig Pi 5 for $50, and besides half the RAM and a lower price, it has a new stepping of the main BCM2712 chip. This is the BCM2712 D0 stepping. Older Pi 5's shipped with a C1. In their blog post, they said: The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the…
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How do MRI Headphones work? (2022)
Thoughts and more by Tom Lingham
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Reverse-engineering a three-axis attitude indicator from the F-4 fighter plane
We recently received an attitude indicator for the F-4 fighter plane, an instrument that uses a rotating ball to show the aircraft's orienta...
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Samsung WB850F Firmware Reverse Engineering
Dissecting and symbol-mapping a camera firmware to get around WiFi hotspot mis-detection
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Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, a chip to "separate the really power-hungry folks from ordinary mortals." The origin...
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Demystifying GPU compute architectures
Getting 'low level' with Nvidia and AMD GPUs
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Shmøergh Hog – The making of a simple analog synth
The making of a simple analog synth
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The Apple IIGS Megahertz Myth
I love the Apple IIGS. It’s a great computer, but could it have been greater? The legend goes that Apple purposefully underclocked its CPU during development to avoid competing with the Macintosh. But is this actually true? Join me for a deep dive into the IIGS architecture, the life the 65816 CPU,
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A Mini Monitor for a Pi
This post outlines how I used a small 2 inch display as a monitor for my pi. Where it can display tty terminals and X desktops and applications as if it was a normal screen connected over hdmi. My overall goal is to have a sort of handheld “console” that I can connect a keyboard to and use as a normal computer. This…
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First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini
I've owned Starlink Mini for about 6 months, using it for camping, backup internet, and in motion inside my car. Here is my honest review.
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A 45 year engineer clears up electric sauna ventilation
Malcolm has analyzed the Finnish 1992 sauna ventilation study profile to improve sauna ventilation in his own backyard sauna.
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Investigating a vanishing BIOS on the Fujitsu Lifebook AH532
A few months ago, I got given a laptop with a very interesting condition. The BIOS setup menu was supposedly inaccessible, and nothing apart from the default boot option works. Time to investigate to see what is actually happening and what we can do about it.
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3600 MHz Raspberry Pi 5 with Liquid Nitrogen
I tried everything but couldn’t turn this Raspberry Pi 5 into the World’s Fastest Pi 5. Unfortunately, we can’t quite claim that title.
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The Mythical Non-Roboticist
What if everyone could do robotics? That would be great, right? We should make a software framework so that non-roboticists can program robots.This idea is so close to a correct idea that it's hard to tell why it's a mistake.
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Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines
The little annoyances that alerted us developers of performance problems
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Raspberry Pi CM5 is a faster, drop-in upgrade
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 is smaller than a credit card, and I already have it gaming in 4K with an eGPU, running a Kubernetes cluster, and I even upgraded my NEC Commercial display from a CM4 to CM5, just swapping the Compute Modules! The Compute Module 4 was hard to get for years. It launched right after the…
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Energy-Harvesting Electronic Holiday Card 2024
We're delighted to share our electronic creation with you this holiday season, six long years after the previous one. The theme this time around is "powered by the holiday spirit", and it's an exercise in energy harvesting.
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The RAM Myth
The RAM myth is a belief that modern computer memory resembles perfect random-access memory. Cache is seen as an optimization for small data: if it fits in L2, it’s going to be processed faster; if it doesn’t, there’s nothing we can do. Most likely, you believe that code like this is the fastest way to shard data (I’m…