The Ware for January 2011 is shown below. Click on the image for a slightly larger version.
The ware this month is not nearly as hard as last month’s stumper. However, I was surprised by many of the clever features of this ware when I started investigating it in more detail, and thought it was worth sharing a high-res pic of the ware.
The ware for December 2010 is an Inmarsat receiver board. According to the submitter, the ware has notable a history:
This is the Inmarsat receiver used during the round-the-world balloon flight attempts by Steve Fossett and Richard Branson. It was located on the ground along with a whole rack full of related equipment. Some time ago a friend of a friend bought the whole lot on eBay, not really expecting to win. It took up a lot of space in his flat for a while, before being donated to the Dorkbot Alba electronics group. It is currently all taking up space in the Edinburgh Hacklab, if anybody wants it…
Here is the uncensored image of the board, along with a picture of the rack of equipment that went along with it:
For the first time in the history of Name that Ware, I do not have a clear winner. After the 70 MHz IF hint was posted, many homed in on it being a kind of satellite receiver front end. Many of the answers were also very thorough, so much that I couldn’t really declare a winner based solely upon quality and depth of analysis (which is my typical tie-breaking factor). As a result, I’m going to declare the reader who submitted this ware the winner — Martin Ling gets the prize this month for stumping the readers!
The Ware for December 2010 is shown below, click on the image for a much larger version.
This is a reader-submitted ware; thanks to Martin Ling of the Edinburgh Hacklab for the submission!
Happy New Year to everyone!
[edit: Nobody’s guessed the ware yet — first time this has happened — so I’ll add a hint. The silver box on the top left hand corner whose label has been blocked out is a precision 70 MHz oscillator by Vectron. Hope that helps!]
It’s impressive how much was deduced from just a tiny portion of a circuit board.
The ware for November 2010 is a Kingston KVR667DS2S5/2G DDR2 SO-DIMM. It’s a zoom in of the area between two DDR2 memory chips, where an I2C EEPROM would sit to help with module identification.
Picking a winner was difficult, but ultimately I’ll say it’s Paul Roukema for having the first mostly-correct answer. Congrats, email me for your prize!
Congrats to Adam Gutterman for finding the cake. The cake is hidden on an internal ground layer, printed in “negative” (i.e., lack of copper on a copper plane). The visible-light photos I make of the motherboards are all taken with front-lit scanners, so the negative image is virtually invisible when viewed in that way. There’s also a solid copper ground plane behind the cake as well, so you can’t simply hold the board up to a light to find the cake (hence the larger bounty). The only two methods to find the cake are to either X-ray the board, or to mechanically delaminate the board using either knife or sandpaper (or both) to reveal the cake. And for the record, the region where the cake is located is electrically inert, such that defacing the chumby logo to reveal the cake does not damage the function of the device.
Adam tells the story of how he found the cake:
I’m an EE at a company that outsources almost all of our board assembly tasks. Anything more complicated than QFPs gets sent out–it’s not worth engineer time to assemble things, especially since we’re not particularly skilled assemblers.
Unfortunately, not all projects have the budget for professional installation. During a recent personal project, we hand-assembled a small batch of boards that had pretty tiny LGA packages. Our initial yields were pathetically low, and we suspected that there were some shorts to blame. Since we didn’t have a professional lab to use, we had to go with our personal connections. The board designer found a friend that had access to a medical x-ray machine, so we sweet-talked ourselves into a quick run through their machine. The resulting film let us get over our hump and bring our boards up successfully.
Anyway, as soon as I saw your post, I decided to do the same thing. Unfortunately, the x-ray office was closed for the long weekend, so I wasn’t able to get my ‘stat’ order in until Monday. When I got the films last night, the focus wasn’t clear enough for me to be able to make out any important features. The films, incidentally, are shown in the directory that I posted on your blog. Undeterred, I spent last night trying to get permission to use a PCB inspection facility at a local university. The okay came through this morning, so during lunch today a couple of us set the board up and started looking for features. It took only a couple of minutes to find the cake once we had access to the right equipment!
I didn’t think it would be found so quickly…just one week from original post, for an item that’s entirely concealed on an inner layer. Then again, ladyada got her open-source Kinect drivers in about the same period of time.
This is probably an interesting datapoint for folks who support the theory that burying traces on the inside of a PCB are an effective method for obscuring the transmission of secret information between chips.