Subject
47 entries
Hardware
Bookmarks
TRMNL Display: e-paper and LCD display software for single-board computers
TRMNL is a display software project for single-board computers (Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi) supporting both HDMI/LCD and e-paper displays. v0.1.0 introduced a build script for choosing display mode and runs in the background so the device stays useful for other tasks.
Universal Radio Hacker (URH): Wireless Protocol Analysis
Universal Radio Hacker (URH) is a comprehensive SDR suite for investigating wireless protocols — demodulation, protocol inference, fuzzing, and simulation in one tool. The go-to tool for reverse-engineering radio signals from weather stations to IoT devices.
Disk Prices on eBay
A price tracker for hard disk drives on eBay, sorted by cost-per-TB. Useful when building out storage-heavy homelab or NAS setups where getting the best $/TB matters.
Bjorn: Raspberry Pi Network Scanner with e-Paper Display
Bjorn is a network scanning and offensive security tool for Raspberry Pi with a 2.13-inch e-Paper HAT display — discovers targets, identifies open ports and vulnerable services, and shows results on the tiny screen. A self-contained portable pentesting device for the hobbyist security researcher.
Building a Deep Learning Rig (Part 2)
Part 2 of building a home deep learning rig: upgrading to a Threadripper 1920X to support three RTX 3090s with full PCIe bandwidth. Total cost €2,379. Key lesson: GPU peer-to-peer DDP failures were fixed by downgrading the NVIDIA driver, not hardware changes.
7-Colour E-Ink Display for Raspberry Pi (Inky Impression 5.7")
Tutorial for the Pimoroni Inky Impression 5.7" — a 7-color e-ink display HAT for Raspberry Pi. Covers setup, driving the display with Python, and displaying images. E-ink's low power draw and paper-like quality make it attractive for ambient information displays.
Best Linux Commands for Advanced Hardware and System Info
A reference list of Linux commands for querying hardware and system information — CPU, memory, disks, PCI devices, USB, BIOS. The kind of cheat sheet you bookmark once and pull up whenever you're debugging a server or setting up a new machine.
How fast can we perform a forward pass?
A deep technical investigation into the theoretical and practical speed limits of a single transformer forward pass, accounting for compute, memory bandwidth, and hardware constraints. The answer matters for inference costs, latency SLAs, and understanding where efficiency gains are actually possible.
Seeing the Clouds with the Cloud: Azure Orbital
Nick Gregory's post on using Azure Orbital (Microsoft's ground station as a service) to receive and process data from weather satellites directly. A hands-on account of the emerging cloud-native satellite data pipeline, written by someone who actually ran it.
Home Lab Beginners Guide: Hardware
A beginner's hardware guide to setting up a home lab — covers server options (used enterprise gear vs. mini PCs), networking basics (managed switches, VLANs), and storage. Entry point to the homelab community's approach to learning infrastructure hands-on.
Inkplate 6PLUS: E-ink Display Development Board
Inkplate 6PLUS is an ESP32-powered e-ink display board designed for maker projects — a 6-inch 1024x758 touchscreen e-paper display with WiFi, built-in battery management, and an Arduino/MicroPython SDK. One of the easiest ways to build custom e-ink devices.
Dive into Deep Learning Compiler
A free textbook companion to Apache TVM covering deep learning compiler design — how neural networks get transformed into optimized code for CPUs, GPUs, and specialized accelerators. Essential for anyone working on ML infrastructure or hardware-software co-design.
Algorithms for Modern Hardware
A free online textbook on algorithms for modern hardware — covers SIMD, cache optimization, branch prediction, and CPU microarchitecture from a performance engineering perspective. One of the most practical resources for writing truly fast code on real hardware.
Portable Python Projects: Home Automation on Raspberry Pi
A Pragmatic Programmers book teaching home automation with Raspberry Pi and Python — projects like smart lighting, temperature monitoring, and voice control, most completable in an hour. Bridges the gap between Python programming and physical home control without requiring electronics expertise.
Internet of Food: Arduino-Based Urban Aquaponics in Oakland
YouTube video documenting an Arduino-based urban aquaponics system in Oakland — combining IoT sensor monitoring with a closed-loop fish-and-plant growing system. Sits at the intersection of hardware hacking and urban food production.
Akasa A-NUC62-M1B: Fanless NUC Chassis
Akasa's A-NUC62-M1B is a fanless aluminum chassis for Intel NUC 12 Pro mini PCs — uses the case itself as a passive heatsink. The go-to option for building a completely silent, low-power home server or desktop without active cooling.
Ubuntu Edge Funding Level
Coverage of the Ubuntu Edge Indiegogo campaign's funding progress in July 2013 — Canonical's attempt to crowdfund a high-spec smartphone/desktop hybrid that ran full Ubuntu. It became the largest crowdfunding campaign in history at the time before ultimately falling short of its $32M goal.
A Tour Inside CloudFlare's Latest Generation Servers
CloudFlare's 2013 tour of their latest server hardware — SSDs, 10GigE NICs, DRAM cache tiers, and non-RAID storage architecture. Ryan's bookmark note compared it favorably to Nutanix's approach to hyper-converged storage.
5D 'Superman Memory' Crystal — Unlimited Lifetime Data Storage
University of Southampton researchers demonstrated 5D optical data storage in quartz glass using femtosecond laser writing — 360 TB per disc, theoretically stable for billions of years. An early result from the lab that eventually led to Project Silica.
Whistle: Fitbit for Dogs
Whistle launched a fitness tracker for dogs — a clip-on activity monitor that tracks steps, rest, and calories for pets. An early example of quantified-self thinking applied to pets, presaging the explosion of IoT and connected health devices.
Scanadu Scout: The First Medical Tricorder
Scanadu Scout's Indiegogo campaign for a handheld medical sensor that measures vital signs (heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, SpO2) in seconds by touching the forehead. One of the most-funded health crowdfunding campaigns of 2013, invoking the Star Trek tricorder as its design aspiration.
Maker Faire 2013
Personal photo from Maker Faire 2013 in San Mateo. Maker Faire was the annual gathering of the hardware hacking, DIY electronics, and maker culture community — a 2013 snapshot of the scene before maker culture went mainstream.
Nutanix Arriving in Production
A tweet photo of a Nutanix node arriving and immediately being put into production — a grassroots signal of Nutanix's fast time-to-value compared to traditional SAN deployments that required lengthy professional services engagements.
New Chip Delivers DNA Results Within an Hour
A 2013 report on a microfluidic chip that could return DNA diagnostic results in under an hour — compressing a process that took days in a lab. A snapshot of point-of-care genomics before it became a commercial reality.
How Intelligent Storage Controllers Have Revolutionized the Industry
DatacenterKnowledge on how intelligent storage controllers — combining flash cache, tiering, and deduplication — changed enterprise storage from dumb arrays into software-defined platforms. A 2013 snapshot of the transition away from spinning-disk-only storage architectures.
Intel Wants to Kill the Traditional Server Rack with 100Gbps Links
Ars Technica on Intel's push to replace copper Ethernet in server racks with 100Gbps silicon photonics links — the argument that data center networking bandwidth was the bottleneck for distributed computing in 2013. Intel's bid to own the rack interconnect layer.
Finally a Nanopore Sequencer That Works
CoreGenomics blog covering Oxford Nanopore's MinION — the first nanopore sequencer that actually worked reliably in practice. A 2013 milestone post documenting the moment nanopore sequencing moved from theoretical promise to real instrument.
Cloudera's Support Team Shares Some Basic Hardware Recommendations
Cloudera's 2010 hardware recommendations for Hadoop clusters — still relevant in 2013 when bookmarked. The canonical guidance on disk, RAM, and CPU specs for commodity Hadoop nodes before cloud deployments became dominant.
Magnetic Logic Makes for Mutable Chips
Nature News coverage of nanomagnetic logic — chips whose computational pathways can be reprogrammed by flipping magnetic domains rather than redesigning silicon. A 2013 snapshot of early research into non-volatile, reconfigurable computing hardware.
The Setup (usesthis.com)
The Setup (usesthis.com) — an interview series asking interesting people what hardware and software they use to do their work. One of the most-read sources on how practitioners actually configure their environments.
How to Convert a Computer ATX Power Supply to a Lab Power Supply
WikiHow guide for converting a surplus ATX PC power supply into a benchtop lab power supply — a classic maker hack that gives you multiple regulated DC voltages (3.3V, 5V, 12V) for cheap. Saves $30–$100 over a commercial lab supply and repurposes e-waste.
Facebook's Next-Generation Servers
Data Center Knowledge coverage of Facebook's next-generation server hardware in 2012 — part of the Open Compute Project rollout that made hyperscale data center design public and challenged the traditional server vendor model.
A Primer on Cheap Software Defined Radios
Yuval Adam's 2012 primer on cheap software-defined radios using the RTL-SDR USB dongle — a $20 TV tuner repurposed as a 24MHz–1766MHz radio receiver. Triggered an explosion of hobbyist RF experimentation that continues today.
Wallet TrackR — Bluetooth Item Tracker
Mashable's 2012 coverage of Wallet TrackR — a Bluetooth-enabled credit-card-sized tracker for finding lost wallets. One of the earliest consumer Bluetooth item trackers, predating the Tile (2013) and Apple AirTag (2021) by years.
Gesticulate — Gesture Interface
Gesticulate was a 2012 gesture-recognition interface project — likely an early prototype using webcam or depth sensor (Kinect era) input for gestural control. Part of the wave of natural user interface experimentation following Microsoft Kinect's 2010 success.
NodeBots: The Rise of JS Robotics
Chris Williams argues that Node.js and JavaScript's event-driven model make it a surprisingly natural fit for physical computing and robotics. A 2012 manifesto for what became the Johnny-Five ecosystem.
Anatomy of a Solid-State Drive
ACM Queue deep dive into SSD internals — NAND flash cells, wear leveling, garbage collection, and how the FTL (Flash Translation Layer) hides the physical complexity from software. Essential for understanding why SSDs behave differently from spinning disks.
Tindie: Etsy for Electronics
Tindie launched as a marketplace for independent hardware makers to sell their electronics projects — an Etsy for electronics. It filled the gap between hobbyist makers who built interesting boards and the audience willing to buy them.
Intel Reveals Neuromorphic Chip Design
MIT Technology Review's coverage of Intel's 2012 neuromorphic chip design using memristors and lateral spin valves — an attempt to build silicon that computes like neurons rather than logic gates. Early work in a research direction that would eventually produce Intel's Loihi chip.
How I Store My 1's and 0's: ZFS + Bargain HP Microserver = JOY
A practical guide to building a home NAS with ZFS on a cheap HP ProLiant Microserver N36L — a popular entry-level home server that punched above its weight for storage. ZFS's data integrity features made it the file system of choice for anyone who cared about bit-rot.
Supercharging the Nervous System with Biological Ion-Transistor Computer Chips
ExtremeTech on biological ion-transistor computer chips that interface with the nervous system using ionic current rather than electronic current. An early signal of the convergence between silicon computing and biological signaling.
Hack Your Housing: Berkeley Freshman's Ridiculously Automated Dorm Room
TechCrunch profile of a UC Berkeley freshman who wired his dorm room with sensors and scripts — including an 'Emergency Party' button — as an early consumer IoT project. A 2012 maker-culture story about students treating their environment as a hackable system.
Magnetic Core Memory Reborn as an Arduino Shield
The Core Memory Shield brought 1950s magnetic core memory technology back as an Arduino accessory — a working piece of computing history you could wire up to modern microcontrollers. More art project than practical tool, but a beautiful one.
DIY PID Controlled Sous Vide Using a Crockpot
A DIY build of a PID-controlled sous vide cooker using a crockpot, a triac, and zero-cross detection — the kind of over-engineered kitchen hack that defined the early 2010s maker movement. A document of when software engineers started applying control theory to cooking.
As 3D Printing Heats Up, Stratasys And Objet Merge
TechCrunch's coverage of the Stratasys-Objet merger in 2012, consolidating two of the largest professional 3D printing companies. A market-structure moment in the first mainstream wave of 3D printing hype.
Turntable Rider: Half Bicycle, Half DJ Controller
Wired's coverage of the Turntable Rider — a bicycle handlebars design that doubles as a DJ controller, with the rider's body movements controlling pitch and cross-fading. An example of the 2012 intersection of maker culture, physical computing, and music hardware.
Teensy USB Development Board
The Teensy USB development board by PJRC — a compact Arduino-compatible microcontroller with native USB. Bookmarked while seeking cheaper Arduino alternatives, it represents the early 2010s maker movement's economics problem: capable hardware at accessible price points.