The Wares for April, 2006, is shown below. Click on the pictures for much larger views.

Ware 1:

Detail 1:

Detail 2:

Ware 2:

Back:

I decided that since I’ve been delinquent in posting wares that I’d give you two wares to look at this time. I think they make a very nice contrast to each other as well; they highlight the gamut of design and manufacturing techniques used today in portable equipment. I’m guessing that one of these Wares will be guessed outright since I suspect several readers have opened one of these up already; the other one is a piece I was given to open up and learn about its internals. The higher-tech design is an example of no-expenses-spared manufacturing and components selection: rigid-flex cables with components on them, used to connect to the LCD; blind and buried vias; conspicuous use of chip-scale packages. The lower-tech design (not that it’s low tech at all, but it’s an easy way to refer to the items without naming them) is a good demonstration of contemporary embedded design with an eye for low-cost and ease of manufacture.

BTW, I discovered something this past month–chicks dig unix. She’s a PhD in bioinformatics and she’s wikked at perl. And she’s learning dvorak. And she’s a lot of fun and dances well. And she’s confident yet modest, very honest, and successful…okay, I could go on, but I’ll spare you. Needless to say I’m smitten. Thank god I’ve been writing kernel drivers for linux lately, and thank god she finds hardware geeks sexy. And no, she’s not available ;-)

Oh, and I’m sure someone will point this out, but in the photo she’s ssh’d into her Linux box from my windows box at home. So actually, yes, the photo is correct, despite the GUI.

Well, I guess last month’s ware was an easy one! The winner is tmbinc, email me to claim your prize :) I thought it was a neat ware–I actually have never seen the inside of a spectrum analyzer myself, and I thought it was very instructional to see how they modularized the design and piped the RF around using SMB cables.

Here is John Miles’ description of this ware:

It’s the RF deck from an HP 8568A spectrum analyzer, the first microprocessor-controlled SA ever built. HP first shipped it in ’79; this one was made in ’83. It’s a relatively-significant instrument, just due to the way it blew everything else out of the water back then (see the HP Journal issue on the 8568A at ftp://ftp.agilent.com/pub/manuals/HPJournal/ ). It took HP several years to bring the 8568A to production; it was probably the hairiest RF/digital design project of its time.

The -A series used a proprietary controller from HP’s desktop computer division; the later -B series had the same RF hardware but went to an 8 MHz 68000.

Tim O’Reilly has the best taste in picking a site for a Faire. I am setting up my booth at the Maker’s Faire, and I realized today that I was short three breadboards–not a good thing when your booth is all about breadboarding. But never fear! The Faire is a mere 5 minutes away from Jameco. Ah, Jameco–I got their catalogs when I was 8 years old and read them front to back with a voyeur’s enthusiasm for all the tantalizing electronic components and kits that I couldn’t afford on my allowance. Going to Jameco is kind of like a pilgrimage for me.

I phoned in an order at 4:30PM and arrived on Jameco’s doorstep at 4:40PM, picking up my missing breadboards. And then I did an impulse buy and filled out a will-call rush order for some battery snaps and some LSTTL parts. I was inspired at the last minute to play with some wearable electronics, as my booth is right next to the changing room for the fashion show. So if you want to learn how to build circuits and watch models walk by all day long in funky tech-inspired outfits, hang out at my booth–it’s in the Oak hall at the far left end of the fairgrounds as you walk toward the stage.

Like I said, Tim O’Reilly has good taste in picking a location for a Maker’s Faire.

Oh, and hurray for 1x EVDO. My new T60p laptop has that built in–I didn’t even realize it when I bought it, hb had to convince me to activate it. So now, even though my booth isn’t lit with Wi-Fi, I’m enjoying broadband connectivity. In fact, I’ve been all the way up and down to Monterey earlier this week, and I didn’t miss a beat. I don’t know how I lived without this.