An All In One Cube PC For A 1990s That Never Quite Happened

When a particular device or appliance is evoked, there comes with it a set of expectations over what it might look like. A toaster, a camera, a washing machine, or a PC, will all have their own acc…

When Dell Built A Netbook With An X86 System-on-Module

Just like with pre-touchscreen cellphones having fancy innovative features that everyone’s forgotten about, there’s areas that laptop manufacturers used to venture in but no longer dare…

A Well Documented BreadBoard Computer Shows Dedication

These pages have not been exactly devoid of home-built computers, with those constructed on solderless breadboard less frequent, but still not rarities. But what is more of a rarity is this ground-…

Implementing A CPU Using 555 Timers And Logic Synthesis

There is many a comment on these here pages along the lines of “Why did you use a microcontroller, when you could just have easily used a 555 timer!” And, yes, we sometimes agree with t…

Homebrew 16 Bit Computer Reinvents All The Wheels

Building your own computer has many possible paths. One can fabricate their own Z80 or Motorola 6502 computers and then run a period correct OS. Or a person could start from scratch as [James Stane…

What’s The Deal With UEFI?

It seems like there are two camps, the small group of people who care about UEFI and everyone else who doesn’t really notice or care as long as their computer works. So let’s talk about…

C Is The Greenest Programming Language

Have you ever wondered if there is a correlation between a computer’s energy consumption and the choice of programming languages? Well, a group Portuguese university researchers did and set o…

SPAM-1 Is A Well-Documented Discrete CPU With An Impressive Software Library

Here at Hackaday we love projects that are so well-documented that you can spend days reading up on what the designer has achieved. [John Lonergan] didn’t disappoint when he designed the SPAM…

3D-printed Fan Mount Keeps Server GPU Cool In Desktop Case

Most readers of Hackaday will be well aware of the current shortages of semiconductors and especially GPUs. Whether you’re planning to build a state-of-the art gaming PC, a mining rig to conv…

Hacking An Obsolete Yet Modern Calculator

The gold standard for graphing calculators, at least in the US, are the Texas Instruments TI-84 series. Some black sheep may have other types, but largely due to standardized testing these calculat…

BreadBin Is An 8-bit TTL CPU On A Breadboard, In A Bread Bin

Building a CPU out of logic gates is a great way to learn about the inner workings of microprocessors, and we’ve seen several impressive projects in this area. [c0pperdragon] set himself the …

Forget Digital Computing, You Need An Analog Computer

The analog computer of decades-gone-by is something many of us younger engineers never got the chance to experience first hand. It’s pretty much a case of reading about them on these fine pag…

Dynamicland Makes The Whole Building The Computer

Every once is a while a research project comes along that has the potential to totally shake up computing and what it even means to interact with a system. The project Dynamicland.org, is a result …

Triple Monitor Luggable PC Is An All In One Powerhouse

[Matt] from [DIY Perks] has made a name for himself building nice custom computing machines, and his latest triple-monitor luggable PC (video after the break) is sure to give most high-performance …

Ask Hackaday: What’s The Best Way To Heat A Tent With A Laptop?

For Europeans, August is usually a month of blistering heatwaves, day after day of cloudless skies and burning sun that ripens fruit and turns we locals a variety of shades of pink. Hacker camps du…

School Surplus Laptop BIOS Hacked To Remove Hardware Restrictions

Why did [Hales] end up hacking the BIOS on a 10 year old laptop left over from an Australian education program? When your BIOS starts telling you you’re not allowed to use a particular type o…

Take Note: An E-Paper Tablet From Pine64

Over the years we’ve seen a variety of interesting pieces of hardware emerging from the folks at Pine64, so it’s always worth a second look when they announce a new product. This time i…

MULTICS Gets A New Release… 52 Years After Launch

If you have ever read anything about the history of UNIX, you may remember that its early development was influenced by an older operating system. MULTICS was developed in the 1960s by MIT and Gene…

Raspberry Pi Pico Used As A Transputer

You can’t fake that feeling when a $4 microcontroller dev board can stand in as cutting-edge 1980s technology. Such is the case with the working transputer that [Amen] has built using a Raspb…

An Epic Tale Of Reset Line Detective Work

The Pine64 folks have given us so many tasty pieces of hardware over the last few years, but it’s fair to say that their products are for experimenters rather than consumers and can thus be a…