The Ware for August 2022 is shown below.
Yet another contribution from jackw01! I had always been curious about these and I thought it was really neat to get a peek inside. It’s interesting how tightly integrated things are becoming – a single tiny black box that does magical things. I hope we collectively never forget what goes into everyday things, or else they may go the way of the Antikythera Mechanism.
The Ware from July 2022 is a pair of circuit boards from the Ricoh Aficio SP C222DN; the board on the left is the formatter/processor board, and on the right is the system controller, with connectors going out to the high voltage board, laser unit, and various motors, fans, clutches, sensors, and switches. Thanks again to jackw01 for contributing this handsomely photographed ware. The winner is Adam for a very close guess to the exact model. It’s hard to nail that down anyways, since printers share so much DNA between models and generations. Congrats, email me for your prize!
The Ware for July 2022 is shown below.
This is yet another fine ware contributed by jackw01. I kind of like how the board on the left went straight from bringup to production, without any attempt to strip out the debug headers or JTAG ports. Which is totally fine, btw: why change something that already meets spec, and might even be helpful with improving yields?…I just have to resist the urge to plug something into said ports.
The Ware for June 2022 is a Cue COVID-19 test cartridge. Congrats to Nathan for identifying it first. Email me for your prize! Also thanks for the comment describing how it works, Frankie — that’s pretty fascinating. I’m copying your comment here so others who might have missed it can benefit from your insights:
The round object in the incubation chamber is a piezoelectric element designed to sonicate the sample solution. This ensures the contents of the lyophilized pellet (which contains the enzymes used for DNA amplification and detection) are well mixed with the sample solution. The PCB has heating elements which melt wax valves when it’s time to send the contents downstream. Lot of clever ideas in the Cue device.
I guess the blue stuff must be the wax valves. I was wondering what that was for. Also — wow, the black element is a mini sonicator. That is downright cool! Now I want to extract it from the plastic and hook it to a signal generator, heh.
Earlier I described the Plausibly Deniable DataBase (PDDB). It’s a filesystem (like FAT or ext4), combined with plausibly deniable full disk encryption (similar to LUKS or VeraCrypt) in a “batteries included” fashion. Plausible deniability aims to make it difficult to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that additional secrets exist on the disk, even in the face of forensic evidence.
Since then, I’ve implemented, deployed, and documented the PDDB. Perhaps of most interest for the general reader is the extensive documentation now available in the Xous Book. Here you can find discussions about the core data structures, key derivations, native & std APIs, testing, backups, and issues affecting security and deniability.