Name that Ware October 2014

The Ware for October 2014 is shown below.

Very busy with getting Novena ready for shipping, and Chibitronics is ramping into full holiday season production. And then this darn thing breaks! Well, at least I got pictures to share.

Have fun!

19 Responses to “Name that Ware October 2014”

  1. Douglas Young says:

    Based on form factor and repetition, I’m going to guess an LCD column or line driver.

    • faulty says:

      LCD gate driver, I would expect a source driver would have a bigger output stage, though I might be wrong. The greenish part looks like bonding pad to the glass

    • Abraham says:

      Going to guess this as well, chip-on-glass LCD driver from your phone?

  2. Eric Hill says:

    How about an old school stick or wand scanner head? It looks like the rows of dots are the lights that light up the object (paper) being scanned. I think the contacts on the side are the signal handoff to a tiny ribbon cable. I’ve taken several of these apart before.

  3. Adrian says:

    Thermal printhead?

  4. DavidG says:

    Is this perhaps a circuit on the flexible pcb found on the front of an ink jet printer head? This would be the piezo layer which is below the part that one can see where the ink comes ot of.
    Is the green looking stripe where the ink comes out and in image B you can just see what appears to be a similar section but black

    • DavidG says:

      Instead of a piezo system it might be using heat instead

    • marcan says:

      This is probably the hybrid piezo/silicon IC that is the actual printhead of an inkjet printer. On the first and last photos you can see where it bonds to the flex PCB, while the green stuff is presumably the row of piezo actuators (with ink residue?). On the first photo you can start to see a second row of everything below, which is why this is clearly not a single-line thermal printer or CCD scanner. Also, ISTR (from having destroyed a print cart or two) that the active element tends to be bonded to the flex PCB on the short edges, which matches this.

  5. Jack says:

    The element from a specialized thermal transfer printer that sticks routes on pcbs?

  6. lain says:

    Fingerprint reader, perhaps…? Like the type used in older ThinkPads.

  7. Joe says:

    I would also guess it’s a fingerprint reader. Will the Novena get one? :)

  8. Markus says:

    HP ink jet colour cartridge. The chip goes behind the flex PCB that has the contacts (and the ink jet holes). This chip has been detached from the flex. There are physical slots in the chip to let the ink through to the front side where the drivers (which use a thermal expansion shock wave to eject the droplets).

  9. pegr says:

    Awesome! I mean, with my Chumby reduced to being a somewhat expensive doorstop, I can’t wait for something new from Bunnie!

    (No, really, I’m really not happy that you chucked Chumby over the side of the boat. I won’t touch another thing you have anything to do with because I don’t know when you’ll get bored and move on to something else.)

    • pegr says:

      Oh crap, wrong thread. Sorry folks…

      • pino says:

        Yeah chumby was the last product i’ll buy from bunnie/bunnie studios or chibi. Bought that thing and about a year later it’s abandoned. That was VERY uncool andrew, now that I think of it was there ever a public apology about all that? Not that it would be any better…

    • Hash says:

      I still have a few Chumby’s (BesyBuy version) and used them for random hacking and as a Pandora radio player for the stereo in my garage. Works great for me and even as something “abandoned” it has worked for years now as an internet radio player.

      I guess it depends why you initially purchased it, for me it’s the best bang for the buck I’ve gotten out of many random technology purchases. The fact that it’s still plugged in and used daily is a testament to that!

  10. Jay says:

    Re: pegr/pino… um, seriously?!? The Chumby sales/marketing team was not Bunnie, so blaming him for it’s demise is pretty far fetched IMHO. At the end of the day, the Chumby is still fully hackable, open-source linux device – similar to buying a raspberry pi. Or… did you guys just buy it cuz it looked like a cool alarm clock!?! :P