Last month’s Ware was a Cue COVID test reader. It uses LAMP (loop-mediated isothermal amplification) to perform a fast and sensitive detection of nucleic acid sequences. Thanks again to Curtis Galloway for contributing this ware for me to take apart and photograph!

Nobody had guessed the ware exactly, but “microfluidic lab on a chip” is a pretty fair generic description of a LAMP reader, so I’ll give the prize to Jimmy. Congrats and email me for your prize!

I had perhaps gotten a bit overzealous with the image redaction, but here is the connector on the PCB that I had blurred out previously. I figured this connector would have been a dead ringer for the mating Cue cartridge.

One other interesting facet – the miniature optical interrupters I highlighted previously are used to detect when the assembly shown above is no longer flush to the circuit board. It’s basically a set of very strong magnets on a flexible polymer membrane.

I’m not quite sure how it works as I’ve never used the test myself, but I seem to recall the test cartridge having a slug of metal in it that would mate with this magnet. Probably, the magnets help to hold the test in place and make firm contact with the connector while giving positive feedback to the user it’s been inserted correctly, and the interrupters allow the circuitry to know when the cartridge is all the way in. The entire thing is constructed to resist some amount of accidental liquid exposure, so this perhaps explains the need for a mechanism to detect cartridge insertion via a sealed, flexible polymer membrane.

The Ware for September 2024 is shown below:

This ware was a gift, but I won’t credit the donor until the solution is revealed, because the credit itself might give a clue about the ware.

My first reaction to seeing this board is: “this thing has a high BOM cost”. My second thought is the engineers who put it together (hopefully) got a lot of free lunches and design advice from US-based FAEs (been there, done that!). My third reaction is, huh, this is a thing (link goes to a Digikey listing for the tiniest photointerrupter that I have ever seen – 2.26 x 1.4 x 1.6mm – it’s ISO1 and ISO2 in the first image of the board; they are flanking the top and bottom of the rectangular cut-out in the board. Could come in handy someday, especially with the compact electromechanics of IRIS…).

Last month’s Ware was a peak programming meter driver board made by JC Broadcast, taken from an Audix broadcast console. Thanks again to Howie M for contributing the ware!

Howie hypothesized that the four mounting holes would be a dead give-away, in his words:

The meters, typical in the broadcast world, have two needles against a single scale; the 4 holes in this board are both mounting points and contacts for the two coils. The board takes a pair of balanced audio inputs, and drives the pair of needles with tightly controlled (and calibratable) ballistic profiles such that they indicate and hold audio peaks correctly, rather than giving the typical slower VU meter response. The board lets you switch the meters between showing the A and B input levels, or a Sum and Difference reading (which I’m guessing is the purpose of the two Meder relays).

However, it looks like nobody picked up on the mounting holes, and this was a stumper. Personally, I think the closest guess was “two-channel galvo driver” – the panel meters are basically galvanometers, so the physics of the guess was correct, which is good enough for me (and probably about what I would have guessed in the end — something audio-adjacent, obsessively concerned with precision calibrations and/or control loop tuning, but without enough heat sinks to push any significant mass). Congrats, Matt, email me for your prize!

PS: the DIP8’s on the hybrids have a Philips logo, but even with the best shot I have of them on file, I still can’t make out the part number.

The Ware for August 2024 is shown below.

Thanks to Howie M for contributing this ware!

The ware for July 2024 is an Ingenico Axium DX8000. I hadn’t had a chance to tear down a modern POS terminal myself, so it was pretty interesting to see all the anti-tamper traces built into the product (thank you jackw01 for sharing it!). I wonder how effective these are, and how they mitigate manufacturing variations to prevent false positives. It looks like they use some custom IC to drive the serpentine traces, so presumably the chips are smart enough to do a training phase that calibrates to the environment and they just look for a “delta” on key metrics to flag a problem. Every computer already has self-training drivers that respond to manufacturing variations (in the DDR busses and high speed comms cables such as HDMI, USB-C, Ethernet, etc.), so I imagine this is fairly solid technology.

Still can’t help but wonder if the terminals can be remote-DoS’d with a relatively simple device that radiates signals at the right frequency to activate the tamper triggers. Thankfully, I haven’t heard of such an exploit, yet.

Jacob Creedon had a strong first guess but Anon got the make and model almost exactly right, so I’ll give the prize to Anon. Congrats, email me for your prize!