If you ever develop an embedded system in a corporate environment, someone will probably tell you that you can only use 80% of the CPU or some other made-up number. The theory is that you will need some overhead for expansion. While that might have been a reasonable thing to do when CPUs and operating […]
Over on his blog our hacker [Scott Baker] restores a Prompt 80, which was a development system for the 8-bit Intel 8080 CPU. [Scott] acquired this broken trainer on eBay and then set about restoring it. The trainer provides I/O for programming, probing, and debugging an attached CPU. The first problem discovered when opening the […]
Over the years Intel has introduced a number of new computer form factors that either became a hit, fizzled out, or moved on to live a more quiet life. The New Unit of Computing (NUC) decidedly became a hit with so-called Mini PCs now everywhere, while the Intel Compute Stick has been largely forgotten. In […]
As we all look across a sea of lifeless, nearly identically-styled consumer goods, a few of us have become nostalgic for a time when products like stereo equipment, phones, appliances, homes, cars, and furniture didn’t all look indistinguishable. Computers suffered a similar fate, with nearly everything designed to be flat and minimalist with very little […]
Copper! The only thing it does better than conduct heat is conduct a great steampunk vibe. [Billet Labs]’ latest video is an artfully done wall PC that makes full use of both of those properties. The parts are what you’d expect in a high-end workstation PC: a Ryzen 9 and an 3090Ti with oodles of […]
Modern computers generate a great deal of heat when under load, thus we cool them with fans and sometimes even water cooling systems. [Doug MacDowell] figured that water was alright, but why not use coffee instead? Someone tell us how [Doug] made this graph look like it’s right out of a 1970s college textbook. The […]
When I was a student, I was a diehard Commodore Amiga user, having upgraded to an A500+ from my Sinclair Spectrum. The Amiga could do it all, it became my programming environment for electronic engineering course work, my audio workstation for student radio, my gaming hub, and much more. One thing that was part of […]
When your GPU fan goes rogue with an unholy screech, you either shell out for a new one or you go full hacker mode. Well, [ashafq] did the latter. The result is a delightfully nerdy fan controller powered by an ATTiny85 and governed by a DS18B20 temperature sensor. We all know a silent workstation is […]
When a tipster came to us with the line “One dollar BASIC computer”, it intrigued us enough to have a good look at [Stan6314]’s TinyBasRV computer. It’s a small PCB that forms a computer running BASIC. Not simply a microcontroller with a serial header, this machine is a fully functioning BASIC desktop computer that takes […]
WarGames fans, rejoice: [Nick Bild] has rebooted WOPR for real. In his latest hack, the Falcon, he recreates the iconic AI from the 1983 film using a Raspberry Pi 400, a vintage SP0256-AL2 speech chip from General Instrument, and Google’s Gemini LLM. A build to bring us back to the Reagan-era. Where most stop at […]