Name that Ware, May 2018

The Ware for May 2018 is shown below.

This month’s contest isn’t about naming a ware. Instead, the challenge is to guess the total amount of vias + holes on the NeTV2 PCB. The closest (or first correct) guess will get a DVT-revision of the board (same as the one shown above) as a prize! Please note: depending on your country of residence you may have to cover import duties or VAT.

At the end of this month, once the contest is over, I’ll upload the PCB source files to a public repo. The contest would be just too easy otherwise :)

14 Responses to “Name that Ware, May 2018”

  1. Jake says:

    I’m guessing 86 holes and 1255 vias. I think it would be possible to count most of them individually, but that’s not what I’ve done :)

  2. Jonathan says:

    888 vias, 69 holes

  3. Kodabar says:

    97 holes, 1276 vias. Yeah.

  4. Barnaby says:

    640

  5. Vegard says:

    I think it’s easy to overestimate and guess too high. Despite having a 484-ball BGA chip, the board is relatively low complexity; only six layers and no blind vias.

    It looks to me as the vias to route out the FPGA accounts for over half the total number of holes in the board, being somewhere on the order of 300 or so. Mounting holes and PTH parts at a glance appears to add up to less than 100.

    My guess is that the total number of drill hits is 576.

  6. 0x3d says:

    Your own NeTV2? :)

  7. Hurka says:

    My guess is 83 holes and 797 vias.

  8. Carl Smith says:

    My guess is 820 total.

  9. adcurtin says:

    81 holes and uh, 484 vias :)

  10. viertaxa says:

    77 holes and 175 vias

  11. mangel says:

    My guess: 84 holes, 962 vias

  12. tim says:

    My totally not an opportunistic guess is 68 holes & 450 vias.

  13. Ryan says:

    Not a contest entry: what’s the deal with the tails on the PCIe presence short pins? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of making them short?

    I guess you probably don’t care about hot-plugging, but still, is there some manufacturing reason?