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If you have ever stared at a misbehaving circuit at two in the morning, muttering about the "bug" you cannot find, you are part of a lineage that runs back to a very literal insect. On September 9, 1947, engineers working on Harvard's Mark II computer opened up the machine, found a moth wedged inside a relay, and taped it into their logbook. The note beside it reads: "First actual case of bug being found." It is one of the most charming artifacts in the history of computing, and it carries a surprisingly practical lesson for anyone who builds connected hardware today. What actually happened in 1947 The Mark II was an electromechanical monster: a room-sized calculator built from thousands of relays, switches that physically clacked open and closed to represent ones and zeros. On that September day the machine was producing errors, and the operators -- part of the U.S. Navy computing effort that Grace Hopper worked in -- traced the fault to Relay #70 in Panel F. Inside was a moth, its wings shorting across the contacts. They removed it, taped it into the logbook at 15:45, and recorded the now-famous line. That page, moth still attached, lives today in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Hopper loved telling the story for the rest of her career, which is why her name is forever attached to it. She is often credited with coining "bug" and "debugging" because of that moth, but the honest history is a little different, and the difference is the interesting part. The word "bug" was already old Engineers had been calling faults "bugs" for decades before 1947. Thomas Edison used the term in an 1878 letter to describe the little glitches and "difficulties" that show up when a new invention meets the real world. By the early twentieth century "bug" was common shop-floor slang among electrical and telephone engineers. So the moth did not invent the word. What made the logbook entry so memorable is the joke buried in it: "first actual case of bug being found"

The new leasing program is a big change for the hardware company, and comes as it looks to raise prices on many of its products.

Light co-founder Kaiwei Tang helped create the Motorola Razr, and he's as surprised as anyone that over 20 years later, the flip phone is relevant again.

Xteink makes its pocket-sized e-reader even better with a touchscreen and front light.

Flock Safety sits right at the center of the debate over where the line should be drawn between privacy and public safety. That’s why we’re bringing Flock’s founder and CEO Garrett Langley to the stage to speak about those very issues.

Scan a menu, pay a bill, onboard a smart plug, and you are using a piece of technology that was never meant for any of those things. The QR code was invented in 1994, and its original job was tracking car parts on a factory floor. Understanding why it was built the way it was explains why it now shows up on nearly every connected device. Who invented the QR code The QR code was created in 1994 by a team led by engineer Masahiro Hara at Denso Wave, a subsidiary of the Toyota group in Japan. At the time, the automotive industry ran on standard one-dimensional barcodes, the striped labels still seen on grocery products. Those barcodes held very little data, usually around 20 characters, and a busy assembly line often needed a worker to scan ten different labels on a single box of components. It was slow, and it was error-prone. Hara wanted a code that could store far more information and be read much faster. His answer was to go two-dimensional: instead of encoding data only in the width of vertical bars, a QR code (short for "Quick Response") stores data across a grid of black and white squares, packing in thousands of characters in a fraction of the footprint. The board game that shaped it The most famous detail of the QR code's origin is where Hara found his design inspiration. He was reportedly playing the board game Go on a lunch break, staring at the black and white stones arranged on the grid, when the idea of encoding information in a two-dimensional matrix of light and dark cells clicked into place. The harder problem was speed. A scanner needs to find the code and figure out its orientation before it can read anything, and in a factory a label might be rotated any which way. Hara's team solved this with the three distinctive square markers in the corners of every QR code. Those "position detection patterns" use a ratio of black to white areas that almost never occurs by chance in printed material, so a scanner can instantly locate the code and work out its an

On the latest episode of Equity, we debate whether Apple's lawsuit will cast over OpenAi's much-discussed plans to get into hardware and go public.

In 1898, years before radio broadcasting existed and decades before anyone used the word "electronics," Nikola Tesla stood in front of a crowd at Madison Square Garden and did something that looked like magic. In a large pool of water sat a small iron-hulled boat. With no wires connecting them, Tesla sent commands through the air and the boat obeyed, turning, stopping, and blinking its lights on demand. Spectators were so unprepared for the idea that some accused him of hiding a trained monkey inside the hull, or of controlling it with his mind. What Tesla had actually built was the first wireless remote control, and it is the direct ancestor of every connected device we make today. A machine that took commands through the air Tesla called his invention a "teleautomaton," from the Greek for "remote" and "self-acting." The boat carried a radio receiver, a set of relays, and a battery driving its motor and rudder. From a control box on the side of the pool, Tesla transmitted radio signals that the receiver decoded into physical actions. Press a control, and a coherer-based circuit closed a relay, which in turn stepped the boat's steering and switching mechanism to a new position. The patent behind the demonstration, US Patent 613,809, "Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles," was granted in November 1898. Read today, it is startling how modern the thinking is. Tesla was not just wiggling a boat around a pool for show; he was describing a general system for sending control signals to a remote machine and having that machine act on them without a human physically present. That is the exact problem statement behind modern IoT , just with vacuum-era hardware. Why nobody knew what to do with it Tesla saw enormous potential. He imagined remotely piloted vessels, automated vehicles, and machines that could carry out instructions from miles away. He even pitched the concept to the US military as a radio-controlled torpedo. The receptio

From AI workflows to battery life and security, here's what it's really like to live with Vertu's luxury foldable every day.

India's smartphone slowdown highlights how the AI boom is reshaping consumer electronics, from pricing and demand to corporate strategy.

Designed for year-round comfort, the Dyson Hot+Cool HF1 combines quiet operation and simple controls with Dyson's signature bladeless design.

As parents look for alternatives to unrestricted smartphones, a growing number of companies are building phones designed specifically for kids, from feature-limited mobile devices to minimalist home phones.

Remarkable's Paper Pure replaces Remarkable 2, and it is quite good.

OpenAI, which is in the middle of a legal battle with Apple over hardware trade theft allegations, just released a light-up keyboard designed to be paired with its agentic coding app.

New Delhi announced a $6.5 billion smartphone manufacturing program and a $13.3 billion semiconductor push to deepen India's electronics supply chain.

Someone has to bundle all the wires that go into rockets, missiles, and satellites.

Look inside almost any modern connected device -- a smartphone, a smartwatch, a Wi-Fi thermostat, a battery-powered sensor node -- and you will find a processor core designed by ARM. It is one of the most successful engineering ideas in computing history. And here is the strange part: ARM has never manufactured a single one of those chips. It does not own a factory. It sells blueprints. A three-person project in Cambridge The story starts at Acorn Computers in Cambridge, England, in the early 1980s. Acorn had built the BBC Micro, a hugely popular educational computer in the UK, and it needed a faster processor for its next machine. The commercial chips available at the time were disappointing, so a tiny team decided to design their own. The acronym everyone knows today originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine . Sophie Wilson designed the instruction set and wrote the simulator; Steve Furber led the physical chip design. RISC -- Reduced Instruction Set Computing -- was the key bet. Instead of piling on complex instructions, they kept the instruction set small and simple, which made the chip easier to build, cheaper, and remarkably power-efficient. The first silicon, the ARM1, was fabricated by VLSI Technology and delivered to Acorn on 26 April 1985. When the team powered it on, it simply worked -- first try. For anyone who has designed hardware, that is almost unheard of; new processors normally need several rounds of revisions to shake out design errors. A famous piece of Acorn lore is that the early ARM chips drew so little current they could keep running on leakage alone after the power was disconnected. From a British computer to the whole world Acorn the computer company faded, but the processor design did not. In 1990 the ARM team was spun out into a separate joint venture, and the acronym was quietly re-expanded to Advanced RISC Machines . The new company made a decision that defined its future: it would not build chips. It would license the designs and let oth

A product idea from RayTally's daily scan of public signals. The idea One-liner: Helps first-time PCB designers find manufacturing and assembly problems on the board before they place an order. Concept: A desktop preflight tool helps first-time PCB designers find contradictions among their manufacturing files before payment. Users drag in Gerber files, a bill of materials, and placement coordinates. The first screen highlights high-risk locations such as board outlines, hole sizes, package orientation, and missing components. Clicking an issue locates the specific pad on the board and shows the design value beside the fabricator's rule. The tool also simulates panelization and the board's appearance after component placement, exposing problems such as insufficient connector overhang and component collisions before they happen. It does not require beginners to read an entire manufacturing standard; it focuses each check on the changes needed for the current order. Why now On July 11, 2026, a first-time board designer publicly documented the full process from designing in KiCad and exporting Gerber and drill files with default settings to sending them to a fabricator and assembling the board by hand. Before powering it on, he still put the odds of a first successful result at "fifty-fifty." At the July 13, 2026, 09:46 UTC capture, the experience had an observed score of 111 and 45 comments on Hacker News. KiCad already provides baseline capabilities including DRC, Gerber viewing, 3D viewing, and manufacturing-file output. Consolidating these scattered steps into one order-level preflight directly addresses the question beginners face before payment: what exactly should they check? Signal Hacker News "Designing and assembling my first PCB" (approximately 111 points and 45 comments, observed July 13, 2026, 09:46 UTC). RayTally scans public signals daily for product ideas worth building. Browse the source page and more product ideas .

The RingConn 3 actually looks like real jewelry, not a wearable -- but its fitness tracking and headache detection features are disappointing.

Kid-friendly tech company Pinwheel announced the launch of a new landline phone designed to let children stay connected without the distractions of a smartphone.