The Ware for January 2018 is shown below.
This side of the board might be a little too non-descript to make a solid guess, so if nobody gets it within a couple of weeks, I’ll push a picture of the other side.
Thanks to spida for handing me pictures of this well-photographed ware at 34C3!
The winner of Name that Ware Dec 2017 is Piotr! Congrats, email me for your prize. He nailed it very quickly as a 2000-series multimeter by Keithley. I figured since this is a classic meter found on many engineer’s benches, it would be named fairly quickly, even with a tightly cropped shot of the main board.
My decades-old Keithley 2000 finally gave up the ghost; something seems wrong in the input stage that’s preventing it from both doing autoranging and measuring negative voltages. A quick thermal scan showed a few transistors getting hot that shouldn’t be, and the self-test codes indicate that something may have gone very wrong with the core ADC pathway. I’ve set it aside to look at later and ended up picking up a Keithley 2110 as a stand-in replacement until I can afford a DMM7510. There’s some pretty nifty debugging tricks you can do with a 7.5-digit multimeter (it’s sensitive enough to differentiate between code execution paths on an MCU, or observe a battery’s self-discharge rate in real time), but at the moment I simply can’t afford one. Ah well — it’s always good to have goals!
The Ware for December 2017 is shown below.
I’ve partially cropped the photo to make it a bit more challenging, but I have a feeling this will be guessed … rather quickly … despite the impediment.
It’s a real beauty on the inside, isn’t it?
The Ware for November 2017 is the “Front Panel Display Board” from an Intel Paragon supercomputer. Many moons ago one of these was being decommissioned at MIT and I raided the cabinet for interesting-looking parts. I snagged a ginormous 5V power supply (the monster could pump out 400A @ 5V) and one of these front panel LED boards. As alluded to by some of the comments, this is the sort of LED board that gets designed when money is not an issue.
Nobody got quite close enough on this one to call a winner, so again this month we have a winner-less name that ware. I have a feeling, however, that next month’s should be a cinch :)
The Ware for November 2017 is shown below.
Happy holidays to everyone!