The Ware for October 2016 is a hard drive read head, from a 3.5″ Toshiba hard drive that I picked out of a trash heap. The drive was missing the cover which bore the model number, but based on the chips used on its logic board, the drive was probably made between 2011-2012. This photo was taken at about 40x magnification. Congrats to Jeff Epler for nailing the ware as the first guesser, email me for your prize!
Winner, Name that Ware October 2016
November 30th, 2016NeTV2 Tech Details Live
November 1st, 2016
Alphamax LLC now has details of the NeTV2 live, including links to preliminary schematics and PCB source files.
The key features of NeTV2 include:
- mPCIE v2.0 (5Gbps x1 lane) add-in card format
- Support for full 1080p60 video
- Artix-7 FPGA
- FPGA “hack port” breaking out 3x spare GTP transceiver pairs
- 512 MB of DDR3-800 @ 32-bit wide memory for frame buffering
I adopted an add-in card format to allow end users to pick the cost/performance trade-off that suited their application the best. Some users require only a text overlay (NeTV’s original design scenario); but others wanted to blend HD video and 3D graphics, which would require a substantially more powerful and expensive CPU. An add-in card allows users to plug into anything from an economical $60 all-in-one
As noted previously, we are currently seeking legal clarity on the suite of planned features for the product, including highly requested features such as alpha blending which require access to the descrambled video stream.
Name that Ware, October 2016
October 31st, 2016The Ware for October 2016 is shown below:
I like this one because not only is it exquisitely engineered, it’s also aesthetically pleasing.
Sorry for the relative radio silence on the blog — been very heads down the past couple months grinding through several major projects, including my latest book, “The Hardware Hacker”, which is on-track to hit shelves in a couple of months!
Winner, Name that Ware September 2016
October 31st, 2016The ware for September 2016 is a ColorVision Sypder-series monitor color calibrator.
Congrats to North-X for naming the ware, email me for your prize!
