I made a discrete logic network card
Hardware
network card
SHOW HN2024
541points
84comments
#58of 3,515 in 2024
Top 2%of 2024 by points
How HN took it
MixedNo clear lean
11 positive, 14 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 3 critical, out of 29 comments about the project. Thread score +0.31.
Privacy: 0 for, 3 againstDocs: 2 for, 0 againstDesign: 1 for, 0 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Impressive, pedagogical build
From 3 comments
Beautiful work to share. > I needed a hardware MAC address filtering. What I really love is the stack trace of reasoning, that's very pedagogical, and that you either worked out…
nonrandomstring on HNThis is truly impressive, not just the work, but the way you have laid it out so simply and effectively. Huge kudos!
jfbenson on HNVery cool! How long did it take you? It's really impressive!
precompute on HN
Clear, well documented write-up
From 2 comments
This is truly impressive, not just the work, but the way you have laid it out so simply and effectively. Huge kudos!
jfbenson on HNMan, that is really, really cool. I just went back and reread the 10BASE-T write up as well. That’s super cool you can even get 2.6kB out of it.
cushychicken on HN
Objections
Opaque hardware could hide backdoors
From 2 comments
This shows how easy it is to put a backdoor inside a chip that is connected to a network port.
amelius on HNA network card with opaque firmware is a 0-day away from becoming a global catastrophe. Even RISC-V based switches like the Vega use proprietary switch chips (Wuhan China…
_factor on HN
Requests
Add WiFi implementation
From 1 comment
Cool. Now waiting for a WiFi implementation :)
amelius on HN
Questions
How would a minimal Ethernet card for a normal PC be built (USB or ISA)?
From 2 comments
So this is for an all-custom computer, which is rather more impressive on its own (to say nothing of "So I made a C compiler."), but now I'm curious what the minimal…
yjftsjthsd-h on HNIf a normal PC had an ISA bus (like they did 30 years ago), my network card could have been connected to it with just some minor modifications.
ynoxinul on HN
Alternatives named
Z80-based designs
From 1 comment
Very cool stuff! Only nitpick I'd have is that author decided to use a custom-design cpu. Ok, "discrete logic only!" is a valid choice. And then keeping complexity to a minimum…
RetroTechie on HN
3Com 3c501 Etherlink card
From 1 comment
So, is it better or worse than the Etherlink 3c501 ? :-D https://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/oldlinux/Linux.old/net/tcpip/ne2000/3c501.c IIRC it over-wrote the buffer the CPU…
actionfromafar on HN