The ware for March 2011 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.

Despite the cropping and sanitizing of this image, I suspect this will still be guessed very quickly…

The Ware for February 2011 is an Aaronia AG HF-60105 handheld spectrum analyzer. I didn’t think that so many people would recognize the analyzer solely from its blue housing; I should have been a little more selective about cropping the photo. I also noticed the chip with the scraped off top-markings near the RF shielded area, which is curious indeed. To the left of that chip is, I believe, the 0.5ppm TCXO timebase option, based upon the flux residue that would evidence removal of a standard crystal oscillator and the installation of the TCXO device next to it.

Picking a winner was very tough this month, as lots of people almost guessed the model number and type but nobody got it exactly right. I think I will go with Jonathan as the winner, since in addition to being very quick, he had shared a bit of analysis and insight as to his thought process. Congrats, email me to claim your prize!

Katamari! <– play!

Na, na na na na na na na, na na katamari damashii~ <– listen!

Kudos to kathack.com for a daft hack. Now to figure out how to get that song out of my head…

The Ware for February 2011 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.

I was loathe to take this one apart, but finally curiosity got the better of me. Enjoy!

The Ware for January 2011 is a BluRay optical pick-up head. There aren’t too many good photos of these on the web, although I did find a fascinating tear-down of the unit used inside a Sony PS3 from 2007. This particular unit is from a Lite-On OEM module manufactured on October 15 2009, from an HP BD-2000 BluRay player. Below is a photo of the motherboard from the BD-2000 player.

One notable features of the pickup-head is that the entire optics assembly — the piece with two lenses on it molded out of white plastic — “floats” on six whiskers of wire. Three of the whiskers are visible in the front. The entire assembly is buttressed by a set of voice coils that manipulate the assembly’s position by pushing against adjacent fixed permanent magnets. If you take a pair of tweezers and poke the assembly it jiggles freely. The mechanical design ingenuity and manufacturing tolerance that goes into making this is impressive, especially for a low-cost mass-market item.

Back when I designed nanophotonic integrated circuits at Luxtera, we had a problem with aligning single-mode fibers to grating couplers on the surface of a wafer. The single mode fiber alignment problem typically requires expensive manufacturing equipment and highly trained operators to get the laser lined up in three dimensions to within a micron of the optimal launch spot, after which the whole assembly is glued in place. This is a bummer, because if the glue shifts during setting or the operator makes a mistake, a very expensive optical assembly is lost.

Thus, I find it amusing that this low-cost assembly can do that and more, on the fly. According to this white paper, an optics assembly like this can achieve a tracking error of 8 nanometers on an assembly that’s moving around, thus allowing dynamic tracking of the laser spot onto media with a track pitch of 320 nm, much smaller than the micron or so spot size of a single mode fiber.

As for the winner this month, it’s Felix. I actually learned quite a bit reading his entry; for example, I didn’t know that the circle segments on the PCB were for ESD management. Thanks for the detailed lesson. Congrats, email me for your prize!