The ware for April 2024 is shown below:

In some ways, this is a much easier ware than last month’s, but I wonder if anyone will be able to name the precise function of this ware. Thanks to Ole for taking the photo, and for the adventures en route to the teardown!

Last month’s ware was internals from a VCH-1006 passive hydrogen maser. KE5FX has published a great write-up about the unit, its history, and how it was repaired.

I’ll give the prize to Hessel. The guess given was about as close as anything I could have done myself — a pretty challenging ware, as I’ve never seen anything quite like this before. Congrats, email me for your prize!

The ware for March 2024 is shown below.

This fine ware is courtesy of KE5FX. Really fascinating stuff, thanks for the contribution!

The ware for February 2024 is the core of a B&G 213 Masthead Wind Sensor, an instrument capable of reporting both wind speed and direction. Thanks again to FETguy and Renew Computers for the contribution! The coil on the left hand side is a brushless resolver, which determines the angle of the wind; the speed of the wind is detected by the pair of inductors on the right hand side.

One might assume the right hand coils are part of a switching power regulator (due to their shape and size), but, interestingly, they are connected with tiny traces, and there are no large capacitors nearby that could be used for filtering. Instead, it seems the coils are used to pick up the movements of magnets that would revolve around the assembly. Presumably these magnets would be attached to the shaft of the anemometer cup assembly, thus giving a read on wind speed.

Personally, I would have implemented something like this using a Melexis rotary position sensor chip, like the MLX90324. These gems can determine the angle of a magnetically coupled axis to 10 bits precision over its entire rated temperature range. I’m guessing there must be something that prevents the use of hall-effect sensors in the application — not sure what, but it would be interesting to know why.

I was thinking I’d give the prize to anyone who pointed out the oddity of the inductors on the right hand side of the board, but nobody seemed to have noticed that. There was one poster, Anon, who did name the exact make and model, but the explanation didn’t do enough to convince me that it wasn’t imaged-searched first and then backfilled with some details. If I judged this incorrectly, I apologize. But, given a lack of satisfactory answers, I will say this month there is no winner.

Perhaps if I let the competition run till the end of the month I’d have more entries, but the competition post will also get progressively more buried under IRIS updates. Thanks for playing, and hopefully my Name that Ware subscribers aren’t too annoyed by the temporary shift in gears!

Here’s the Ware for February 2024:

Here’s another ware courtesy of FETguy, who recovered this from Renew Computers in San Rafael, CA. Renew is a recycling facility that apparently processes a fair bit of e-waste. NGL: I’m a little envious of being able to rummage around an e-waste facility from that part of the world – probably some great gems to be found there!

As with most wares these days, you’ll find some hits if you do an image search, so a simple recanting of make and model number will not beat an entry that elucidates at least some the many unique and interesting aspects of this design.

Happy leap day!