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atomic14
Personal blog · atomic14.comhardwareprogramming
atomic14 is a personal blog at atomic14.com about hardware and programming. Since 2022, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 78 times, most often “Using ChatGPT for Home Automation”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this post about using GPT-4 for home automation. One commenter cites it as an example of a hobbyist building better home automation than large companies, and makes their own point from it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A collection of slightly mad projects, instructive/educational videos, and generally interesting stuff.Building projects around the Arduino and ESP32 platforms - we'll be exploring AI, Computer Vis...
Most-linked posts?
- Using ChatGPT for Home Automation2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-05-15
- Crowdfunding Success – Was it worth it?2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-07-23
What Hacker News says?
Occasionally updated blogging site to go with my YouTube channel. https://atomic14.com/ Doesn’t get a lot of love and the look and feel hasn’t been updated for years.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted Why is Google still serving dodgy ads? as a story · 962 points
HN discussionI did some experiments with very simple AI detection. You can get a very long way with simple ngram probabilities. https://meatbag.atomic14.com/ https://www.atomic14.com/2026/08/18/detecting-claude-with-le... It’s very hard to make reliable though. Different models have different characteristics and you can prompt your way out of being detected.
Comment linking /2026/08/18/detecting-claude-with-letter-counts
on “The revolt of the reader”Submitted Picking up free lithium cells off the street and making them safe for use as a story · 302 points
HN discussionI did this recently - https://www.atomic14.com/2026/08/03/twelve-dev-boards-from-o... Instead of trying to vibe it all - I got Claude to write deterministic scripts for creating the boards. And did this before trying to completely vibe it: https://www.atomic14.com/2025/07/12/vibing-hardware
Comment linking /2025/07/12/vibing-hardware
on “Can AI design circuit boards yet?”Submitted I made a 10¢ MCU Talk as a story · 206 points
HN discussionDuring pandemic I started up a YouTube channel (I'm sure I'm not alone...) just to document my side projects ( https://www.youtube.com/c/atomic14 ) - for some reason I've found it much easier to publish videos than write blog posts. The YouTube channel has done fairly well with around 24,000 subs and has led to a lot of interesting conversations and consulting work. My original intention was to do blog posts in conj…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?”Submitted It's Plausible, but Is It True? as a story · 9 points
HN discussionFunny, just looked at one of my previous blog posts and it's strangely appropriate! https://www.atomic14.com/2020/08/25/how-do-we-debug.html
Comment linking /2020/08/25/how-do-we-debug.html
on “Picking up free lithium cells off the street and making them safe for use”Submitted Using ChatGPT as a Co-Founder as a story · 8 points
HN discussionA semi successful YouTube video with less 2m views can easily bring in several thousand dollars in ad revenue. He is way more successful and has multiple sponsors. https://www.atomic14.com/2022/07/27/successful-youtube-video...
Comment linking /2022/07/27/successful-youtube-video.html
on “John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips”Submitted Using ChatGPT for Home Automation as a story · 7 points
HN discussionCrowdSupply is great - I ran a successful project through them. And I would definitely recommend anyone doing some hardware taking a look. There are a couple of things to be aware of - everything is shipped to the US and then distributed from there (using Mouser US). From the project point of view this means, depending on where things are manufactured) tariffs can come into play. The terms of shipping to mouser are…
Comment linking /2025/07/21/crowd-funding-retro
on “Using e-ink tablet as monitor for Linux”Submitted Rescuing my 2006 Travel Blog as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI made a similar thing a while back - works really well. https://www.atomic14.com/2020/07/25/browser-ar-sudoku.html You can see it in action here: https://sudoku.cmgresearch.com/ (assuming it still works - haven't tried it for a while).
Comment linking /2020/07/25/browser-ar-sudoku.html
on “Show HN: Visual Sudoku solver in the browser”Submitted Crowdfunding Success – Was it worth it? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMy site is generated by Jekyll and then I just sync to S3 and serve it all through CloudFront - works pretty well https://atomic14.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Where do you host images for your blog or landing pages?”Submitted We should be embracing ChatGPT and Friends as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFrom today, it lets a hobbyist create better home automation than trillion dollar FAANG companies can provide: https://www.atomic14.com/2023/05/14/is-this-the-future-of-ho... The novelty is asking the machine to use its own genius to do the right thing.
Comment linking /2023/05/14/is-this-the-future-of-home-automation.html
on “Just Calm Down About GPT-4 Already”Submitted What does a successful YouTube video look like? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWe got a ZX Spectrum when I was 12 and used the built in basic. I wrote up some of my early memories here: https://www.atomic14.com/2022/08/19/a-life-in-tech-part1.htm...
Comment linking /2022/08/19/a-life-in-tech-part1.html
on “Ask HN: At what age did you become interested in coding?”Submitted Jev Plays Manic Miner as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wrote a bit about this in CrowdSupply write up - https://www.atomic14.com/2025/07/21/crowd-funding-retro CE is all about self certification. The lab testing gives you the confidence to do this. It can be expensive - but Chinese test labs are very affordable and do a really professional job. There is now quite a good EU based service - https://early.smander.com/ I used them to get some advice early on (disclaimer,…
Comment linking /2025/07/21/crowd-funding-retro
on “What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard”Submitted Don't blame Claude – It's me, I'm the problem, it's me as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI’ve been playing around with energy harvesting to make my ePaper weather display run on batteries. It’s kind of working, but the solar cell I’m using is pretty small and we really find get enough sun up in the north. It is still running though and if it can last until summer the battery should charge back up to full capacity. https://atomic14.com/2023/03/23/energy-scavenging.html
Comment linking /2023/03/23/energy-scavenging.html
on “Show HN: A solar-powered, batteryless ePaper photo frame”Submitted Hacking a Cheap PIR Night Light into Something Useful as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe thing to remember is that these large language models are not telling the "truth". They are generating the most plausible set of text that would follow a prompt. Plausible text could be "true'. Or it may just be the text that fits the right shape. You can see some examples here: https://www.atomic14.com/2023/01/08/prioritising-plausabilit...
Comment linking /2023/01/08/prioritising-plausability-over-truthfullness.html
on “Ask HN: What if ChatGPT is lying, purposely?”Submitted Watching LLMs Think as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://atomic14.com mostly electronics projects with a bit of software engineering and random stuff thrown in.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted OpenAI Keynote – According to GPT4 as a story · 2 points
HN discussion