The ware for May 2008 is shown below.

I was originally thinking about just using the lower image only for the Name that Ware hint, but I decided it was a bit too hard to tell what it was from that alone, so I included a photo of a (carefully cropped) portion of the top side of the PCB. Hopefully I haven’t revealed so much that the contest is trivial, but there is still enough to make a solid guess as to what this is.

Thanks to everyone for playing and your patience with the tardiness of the competition postings. It’s literally Christmas in June when you’re in the consumer electronics business, so things have been very busy. Also, I will be in Amsterdam this weekend for the XBMC devcon hosted by Boxee. If you’re in the area drop me an email!

I’m always impressed at how someone manages to nail even the most obscure wares — this one never made it into production, although its details are searchable in Google. Alex Badea is the winner for correctly naming the device first in his May 19th post. Congratulations, and email me to claim your prize!

The ware for April 2008 was the motherboard from the ill-fated HP Xpander project. Since it’s a reader-submitted ware, I’m not too familiar with the history of the project; it was apparently some kind of a graphing calculator plus Windows CE device. Talking about HP graphing calculators does bring back some nostalgia, though — I still have my old HP 48gx graphing calculator from my late high school days. Thinking back, I can’t believe how much of a nerd I was to carry that thing around with me everywhere in my front pocket (and that thing is not small). You couldn’t separate me from my graphing calculator. I guess I was one of the un-coolest guys in high school for a reason — but, I did score points for being able to fix other people’s graphing calculators when they got crushed at the bottom of a backpack.

Again, thanks to 92915810cf6b9f60b0bb06bc498ea884 for sharing the ware!

PS: previous winners, I finally mailed out your prizes, with the exception of Sii — I got an email from you and I responded, but I never heard back with your address. Maybe it got swallowed by the spam shark?

The Ware for April 2008 is shown below. Click on the images for a larger version.

This ware is actually a reader-submitted ware, thanks to 92915810cf6b9f60b0bb06bc498ea884 for the ware! I love one-way hashes, don’t you? Protecting privacy while giving attribution…it’s great. The ware is actually a prototype of a device that was never made available on the market for sale, although when I poked around a bit I found enough documentation here and there on the web to make the contest solvable. The company that made these boards was clearly not shy about applying their logo liberally all over the board.

My apologies for the tardiness of the ware. This is one of the first times I’ve actually slipped well into the next month, but I hope to get back on track soon. Being at the Maker’s Faire in San Mateo earlier this month completely wiped out the weekend that I usually do the posting, and then I had a very busy couple of weeks.

The ware for March 2008 was a GE Skype DECT Phone, model 28310EE1. mangel gave a great analysis of the images and also nailed the exact model number of the phone! Congratulations, email me to claim your prize.

I thought one of the interesting features of this board is the fact that it doesn’t bear a GE logo. I had pixelated the logo on the initial photo to try and make the competition a little bit more challenging, but as you can see below the board bears an “RTX” logo.

RTX is actually a Danish company that specializes in ODM product design, and they have several SIP/Skype phones in their portfolio. This is quite typical of a trend that I find a little bit puzzling in US retail. Many of the major brand names, such as Westinghouse, GE, and Kodak do very little consumer electronics product engineering; it’s more typical that the core IP is generated off-shore, either by a European firm or an Asian firm. How these big brand names manage to maintain a grip on the market despite the fact that a smart competitor could easily source the same design and sell into the same market is a testament to how much marketing matters over actual product functionality or usefulness.

I also thought the board was fairly interesting for its integrated antenna structures. The cut-out regions presumably help tune the antenna’s performance and the two elements are positioned at right angles to increase their diversity.

Also, February’s contest was undecided as of the last posting; based upon the revealed plaintexts, Sii is the winner. Congrats, and please email me to claim your prize! I’ll try to get more silicon contests up in the future.

“I knew the only way I was going to beat my son Alex at Guitar Hero was to cheat”

-Michael ( January 1, 2008)

Oh man, this is so cool. A guy has created a circuit that takes in composite video, performs signal processing, and then correctly “hits” buttons on the guitar hero controller based upon what’s on the screen. He calls it the AutoGuitarHero AGH1000:

The AGH1000 is connected between the Wii’s video output and the TV or monitor’s video input. The Wii’s video output format is NTSC Composite Video. This means that all the information to properly drive a video monitor is present on a single wire – typically the yellow RCA connector. We used this composite video signal to generate signals that electrically press the correct notes and strum button at the correct time. The system consists of four sections – the Analog Processing Board, the Digital Processing Board, the Driver Board, and the Opto-Isolator Board.

Cheats like this are undetectable to the console…from the perspective of the code inside the console, he’s hacked The Matrix.

He’s posted videos of it working, schematics, and source code (VHDL oh noes! I loves mah verilog). Thanks for sharing Michael!

I get a hankering to do something like this every time I play Tetris at level 5 against the game AI on my DS (or when i play caustik). Someday, when I have spare time (…), I want gut a DS and put a frame buffer scraper on it and wire up its buttons to the GPIOs of a chumby. Actually, I want to hack up two of these, and configure them to play head to head. Then, people can submit AI engines for each hacked Tetris DS controller and we can have dueling user-submitted Tetris AIs. Using the DSes as the intermediate for the head-to-head game ensures that you are obeying “regulation” DS rules (how fast pieces can be turned, dropped, and order of piece generation) and running the image recognizing game AI on chumbys would put a limit on how much CPU and memory resources you can have. That might be the only way I could beat caustik at some form of Tetris…actually, nah, I think caustik could write a better AI engine than I can, come to think of it.

Drat.

Thanks to roastbeef for the link!