Over on YouTube [Matt Brown] hacks a Chinese security camera recently banned by the US government. If you didn’t hear about this you can find out more over here: Major US online retailers remove listings for millions of prohibited Chinese electronics. After powering the camera with a power-over-Ethernet (PoE) adapter [Matt] sets about monitoring network […]
In this video our hacker [Inkbox] shows us how to create a computer game that runs directly on computer hardware, without an operating system! [Inkbox] briefly explains what BIOS is, then covers how UEFI replaces it. He talks about the genesis of UEFI from Intel in the late 90s. After Intel’s implementation of UEFI was […]
It’s becoming somewhat of a running gag that any device or object will be made ‘smart’ these days, whether it’s a phone, TV, refrigerator, home thermostat, headphones or glasses. This generally means somehow cramming a computer, display, camera and other components into the unsuspecting device, with the overarching goal of somehow making it more useful […]
There’s always some debate around what style of architecture is best for certain computing applications, with some on the RISC side citing performance per watt and some on the CISC side citing performance per line of code. But when looking at instruction sets it’s actually possible to eliminate every instruction except one and still have […]
A team of hackers, [Jason T. Jacques], [Decle], and [Michael A. Wessel], have collaborated to deliver the Microtronic Phoenix Computer System. In 1981 the Busch 2090 Microtronic Computer System was released. It had a 4-bit Texas Instruments TMS1600 microcontroller, ran at 500 kHz, and had 576 bytes of RAM and 4,096 bytes of ROM. The […]
Building a computer on a breadboard is a seminal project for many builders, but it can become complicated quite quickly, not to mention that all the parts needed for a computer are being placed on a medium which often lends itself to loose wires and other hardware bugs. [3DSage] has a working breadboard computer that […]
Although computers are overwhelmingly digital today, there’s a good point to be made that analog computers are the more efficient approach for specific applications. The authors behind a recent paper in Nature are arguing that inference – essential for LLMs – can be done significantly more efficiently using an analog optical computer (AOC). As the authors […]
[Scott Baker] is at it again and this time he has built a 4-bit single board computer based on the Intel 4004 microprocessor. In the board design [Scott] covers the CPU (both the Intel 4004 and 4040 are supported), and its support chips: the 4201A clock-generator, its crystal, and the 4289 Standard Memory Interface. The […]
Over on his blog our hacker [Scott Baker] has a Magnetic Bubble Memory Mega-Post. If you haven’t heard of magnetic bubble memory before it’s basically obsolete nonvolatile memory. Since the 1970s when it was introduced this type of memory has been outperformed in every dimension including durability, reliability, price, density, performance, and so on. For […]