The Ware for March 2025 is shown below.

I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup.

This is a technique a friend of mine told me about where you put a polarizer on the light source, and then put another polarizer 90 degrees from the light source in front of your imaging lens. As you can see from the comparison above, the contrast on the part numbers is greatly enhanced — at the expense of losing most of your light. What isn’t obvious from the two images is the one on the left required a much longer exposure because 90+% of the light is not reaching the camera due to the cross-polarization.

My understanding of the theory is that with this technique, light that hits textured surfaces is more scattered (and likewise the polarization is more randomized) by the rougher, laser-marked regions of a chip label, while light bouncing off of smoother surfaces is attenuated because the polarization is more preserved (and thus blocked by the cross-polarized filter on the lens). So it’s less of an enhancement of the laser marked regions and more of an attenuation of everything that’s not.

The solution to the attenuation problem in our modern era is to just throw more light at it and mount your camera on a stand so you can afford a longer exposure time. Fortunately white LEDs are really cheap and ridiculously powerful, and I have some extra COB-based ring light emitters laying around the lab. The technique doesn’t scale to large boards as easily, but it just so happens this particular ware fits nicely in the field of view of the illuminator + camera.

The whole setup is pretty crude…just a cheap polarizer film that was rough-cut with scissors, and taped onto a $10 COB ring light I picked up some time ago in the Shenzhen markets that screws directly into the accessory threads of the objective on my benchtop microscope. Works OK, tho!

The Ware from last month is the main board from a Lego Duplo Steam Train. As predicted, this was a much easier one to guess. Congrats to MJS for naming it (with a margin of just half an hour ahead of Will), email me for your prize! And again, thanks to spida for contributing yet another ware.

Here’s the Ware for February 2025:

Thanks again to spida for contributing yet another guest ware! Hopefully this one is a smidge easier to guess compared to last month’s.

The ware for January 2025 is the Gavilan SC laptop motherboard. The Gavilan laptop is one of the first portable computer designs, announced in 1983, at a 2024-equivalent price of $12,400. However, the company only survived for one year, per Wikipedia:

Owing to a rigorous overhaul of the design of the laptop, the company missed its initial shipment deadline of December 1983, with the first several dozen units shipping instead in April 1984. Early units were fraught with technical issues, prompting more tweaks. Mass production and sales did not commence until June 1984. By this point, a major distributor of the Gavilan computer had filed for bankruptcy and was forced to pulled out of their deal with Gavilan. In late 1984, Gavilan Computer Corporation themselves declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy with cash flow problems. The company ceased operations in 1985, having only shipped a few thousand units of the Gavilan SC.

The number of blue wires on the main board is pretty consistent with “fraught with technical issues, prompting more tweaks”, and the history of the company reads like a botched Kickstarter from 2010, except it happened in 1984.

I was a little surprised at how difficult it was to guess the nature of the ware. I think contestants were reasonably thrown off by the inclusion of the modem. That would be a pretty forward-thinking feature to be designed into a laptop mainboard back in 1984. It’s also puzzling why one would preferentially integrate the modem over say, the RAM/ROM on the mainboard: generally there is some bare minimum memory required for a system to even function, whereas a modem might benefit from modularity for e.g. SKU diversity and/or future-proofing against improvements in modem hardware.

That being said, the company didn’t survive. Perhaps it is due in part to poor integration decisions from the get-go, yet contestants were viewing the ware through the lens of good decision making. Personally, I have found some of the hardest wares to guess to be poorly designed wares, as the final form is a bad fit for the function.

After reading through the comment thread a couple of times, I find it too hard to assign any one person a clear winner. A shout-out to FETguy for the explanation of the crinkly solder mask: I think the SMOBC vs HASL answer is correct – turns out I probably knew the answer to this once upon a time, but I had forgotten it with old age. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a tie to break in the competition – I think none of the guesses got close enough for me to declare a winner, despite all the thoughtful commentary. Thanks to everyone who participated!

The ware for January 2025 is shown below.

Thanks to brimdavis for contributing this ware! …back in the day when you would get wares that had “blue wires” in them…

One thing I wonder about this ware is…where are the ROMs? Perhaps I’ll find out soon!

Happy year of the snake!

Update Feb 12 2025

Seems to be a stumper. Lots of good analysis, but …

There’s been some mention about seeing the back side of the board; brimdavis was kind enough to provide a nice image of that:

I like how there is a dashed white line for where a blue wire should go.

Also, apparently the “wrinkly” effect is due to a problem “back in the day” where solder wicks under the solder mask during wave soldering? I never got a definitive answer on what causes that, or why modern boards don’t seem to have that issue anymore. In case nobody can guess what this ware is, I’d accept a convincing answer for the wrinkly soldermask mystery as a “tie breaker”.

I’ll drop another hint – brimdavis sent me a contextual photo of the assembly, and the ROM, RAM, and video board plug in through the 42-pin connector just above the telephone line connection unit.