Alternatives
Products that do what I built an open-source kernel for Texas Instruments calculators does
You know that old TI calculator you used in high school, then put in a box and forgot about? Have you ever wished you had an operating system for your calculator with preemptive multitasking, dynamic memory management, a tree filesystem conforming to the FHS, and all the comforts of Unix? Well, good news: that's totally a thing that exists. I've been working on my kernel for about three and a half years now and I'm looking for new contributors to help out. It's written entirely in z80 assembly, and it's both challenging and fun to work on. There's an IRC channel for contributors or people…
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- 2KA
2016 · knightos.org
- 3IM
https://github.com/siraben/ti84-forth Hi HN! For the past year I've been getting into programming in Z80 assembly (especially for the TI-84+). More recently I've been learning about the Forth programming language and after a lot of searching online (in vain) for a Forth interpreter for the TI-84, I decided to write one myself. It's been fun demoing this to others, because it's a very unexpected use of a calculator. It's my largest project to date, and I'm interested to know what the HN community thinks, please feel free to critique my code! -- Ben
2018
- 4IM
This is a personal project I've been working on and off for the past few years. It's a set of tools that have allowed me to prototype quickly small (and increasingly bigger) kernels, and create userspace programs to interact with them. Supports riscv64, amd64 and i386. The intel port has been tested and used on real hardware, from big dual-socket Xeon machines to an old X220. It is all C, I have plan to make rust bindings for the kernel library. But again, they're plans at this stage. Porting to new architectures is relatively simple, a basic port to riscv took me a couple of weeks of…
2024 · github.com
- 5IM
https://github.com/siraben/zkeme80 As a successor to my previous project[1], a Forth interpreter that runs under the TI operating system, I decided to go all the way and write my own assembler and OS. This is a project I've been working on for just over a month, but there's still a long way to go. The idea is to have a kernel + the Forth interpreter and compiler, then users can modify how their operating system works through the Forth files. My Forth implementation is mostly ANS-standard conforming, so most code should work right out of the box without any problem. See…
2019
- 6IS
Everything that would be here is in the README. I hope this gets big, it has tons of potential.
2013 · github.com
- 7AU
I blew off a bunch of "serious" side work last month and built a tiny little embeddable editing tool that I've wanted to have for Ars Technica since, well, the beginning of internet time. It lets any random user make edit suggestions for writers/editors to consider and act on. I think it's pretty cool and it's gotten some good use over the last few weeks. Of note, it's uses a single-field signup form. Edit administration is currently email based, so all it needs is an email address to get people going. I'm sure I'm not the only person to ever do this, but I basically just turned it on one…
2011
- 8LS
Kicked my course off today - grep101.com - with lessons starting Monday. I think I've got the pricing right to attract a good class of keen learners for this first run through...
2012
- 9E
Hello everyone, A couple of months ago I was introduced to Excalidraw and fell in love with it instantly. The only thing I didn't like was that I couldn't easily save my whiteboards and had to put everything in one whiteboard which started to lag my PC after a while. So I made ExcaliHub. It's exactly as it sounds: a hub for Excalidraw. It's free, open source, and I aim to keep it that way. Thanks in advance for any feedback!
2024 · excalihub.dev
- 10
Hey yall, I built this for my makerspace. We wanted to let each other borrow things, but also didn't want to put up a big shiny sign saying "hey everyone, my garage has a super fancy oscilloscope just sitting there" and also didn't want to necessarily always need to say yes to everything. However, when I show it to people, they've been suggesting using it for other things like board games, or wedding equipment, etc. I'm still trying to find PMF, so please let me know what you think! For the stack, it's all Elixir + LiveView which is really nice, and then Fly.io, Fly's MPG, Tigris Data,…
25d ago · toolpool.garden
- 11IB
Hey HN! Last week I was working on a website and needed a way to synchronise visuals with live music. I've used MIDI controllers for this before, but I am travelling right now and don't have mine with me. So I had the crazy idea to build a browser extension that uses the keyboard as input and includes a sequencer. I gave myself 24 to work on it. It ended up taking longer (of course), specially since I ended up creating a demo, a small landing, docs, and an intro video. Took me one week from idea to launch (pushed quite a bit tbh). Features: - Works as a browser extension. Atm distributed…
2024 · minitap.io
- 12IR
Democratisation of local AI is key. I've been working on pushing the limits of commercial hardware, squeezing any extra bit possible. My Scientific Agentic AI hareness helped me to reallocate every single bit of it. I rewrote the Kernel, I went down the CUDA rabbit hole until I have been able to explain any bit and any ms of computational power involved in the process pushing the Qwen 30B-A3B from 8 tok7s to 19 tok/s with llama.cpp up to 22.2 tok/s with my project and 109 tok/s on not novel content and speeding up the prefill by 5-9X
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 13
I made this after seeing someone posit the idea online yesterday over lunch then spent some time refining it. So far it's pretty impressive IMO! Right now I am running Qwen3-30B-A3B on my 24gb unified memory m4 MacBook Pro at 50 tok/sec and this should definitely not be working for such a large model on my middling hardware. Things are detailed in the README to get up and running and DESIGN.md has details on all the choices and such made along the way.
23d ago · github.com
- 14IA
Hey HN, I am making an 8-Bit CPU in Logisim and blogging about it.t's nothing fancy, really simple, unoptimized dumb CPU for sake of learning. I am no electrical engineer, I am just a self-taught dude who has programming as a hobby and wanted to dive deeper into abstractions. So here it is, so far I wrote 2 parts: [links redacted] I welcome any and all critique and feedback, as I can be wrong about everything for sure.
2017
- 15MH
Just wanted to make my first post about something interesting I've been working on for some time. Any ideas/suggestions for new hardware or software I should try out are welcome, though I will only have time for a major overhaul in a month or two where I want to redo and document everything a bit better than how it is currently. Hope this can inspire someone to start their own homelab or give some ideas to already existing ones!
2024 · github.com
- 16IM
Hey HN! I made a completely open sourced alternative to Weights and Biases with (insert cringe) blazingly fast performance (yes we use rust and clickhouse) Weights and Biases is super unperformant, their logger blocks user code... logging should not be blocking, yet they got away with it. We do the right thing by being non blocking. Would love any thoughts / feedbacks / roasts etc
2025 · github.com
- 17LF
Hi HN, I just wanted to share what I have been working on for the past few months: A firmware analyzer for embedded Linux systems that helps uncovering security issues running entirely in the browser. This is a very early Alpha. It is going to be rough around the edges. But I think it provides quite a lot of value already. So please go ahead and drop a firmware (only .tar rootfs archives for now) and try to break it :)
Mar 2026 · xray.boldwark.com
- 18CT
Hey gang, My names Ryan. I Develop Desktop applications, usually for Windows. I made this little Trainer application , if anyone wants to try it out. It lets you manipulate values in memory, in-order to hack stats, crafting materials, etc. If you like it, have any suggestions, or angrily yell about the console release, feel free to hmu. https://github.com/howzitkiffen/Cyber-Punk-Trainer (PS: Looking for work!)
2020
- 19IL
Sysadmin is my bread and butter, but I taught myself PHP and have been coding on and off for the past 6 years. I've worked on numerous freelance gigs, but mainly internal apps that I use for my real job. I worked on this project (on and off) for the past year and I'm happy to finally release it to the public. Even if it doesn't succeed, I'm happy that I was able to "scratch an itch" I've had for the past couple of years. I wanted to make something and prove to myself that I can program. I'm not the greatest, but I'm proud of what I've achieved. http://www.ikeepm.com
2011
- 20PA
2017 · github.com
- 21RS
Hi HN! I've been hacking on this side project for the last month or two with the goal of making it dead simple to use cloud GPUs. I ran into this problem personally during the phd, and built my own tooling around it. I always thought it'd be fun to try to turn that tooling into a more general product... and bitbop.io is the result! All you have to do is run `ssh bitbop.io`, and you get your own personal dev GPU workstation in the cloud. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
2024 · twitter.com
- 22IM
Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc). No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.
Jul 2026
- 23IM
I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.
2024 · github.com
- 24AO
Over the last few weeks, I worked on a set of tools which enables (1) a modern workflow to build customized images for Raspberry Pi, (2) robust over-the-air updates with rollback support of the entire system, including firmware files, and (3) managed state which is preserved across reboots and updates. The goal is to have a reliable platform for creating Raspberry Pi-based products. The initial motivation for the project came from one of our customers who uses Raspberry Pi to control test benches for pedelecs. The entire project is open-source. Feel free to check it out and give it a try.…
2023 · oss.silitics.com
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