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.

The ware for December 2024 is a 2mm pitch, 64×64 LED panel purchased from Evershine Opto Limited. Their sales part number is ES-P2-I, but the silkscreen says DCHY-P2-6464-1515-VP. The seller is just the name slapped on the box; like most commodity wares, there’s likely multiple channels offering the exact same make and model. So, I’ll accept any generic that more or less matches the spec as the winner.

As a matter of the “spirit” of the competition, my goal is to encourage thoughtful analysis, rather than “first to post”, so I will tend to award more insightful or accurate answers over quick answers. It’s a balance between rewarding “open discussion” versus “first to post”: I don’t want things to devolve into either a situation where nobody shares ideas out of fear that someone might riff off of their thoughts and win the prize; but I also don’t want a situation where folks are just throwing partial guesses at the wall to claim priority.

That being said, I had observed this would be an easy ware, which indicates priority to more insightful answers, not the first correct answer. To that end while “h” got the quickie out, Joe did produce a link to an exact match on the ware (which, significantly, is not what I get when I do an image search for the ware, although perhaps the results are geolocated). Meanwhile, Ian commented on some actual design features – an insight you wouldn’t get out of a rote image search.

In my mind, all three could be eligible for the prize in this case. I think if “h” had looped back and commented on some other design feature of the ware (doesn’t have to be lengthy – similar to Ian’s is sufficient), it would have been straightforward to give the prize to “h”. But because the ware was so easy to guess, the prize goes to Joe for producing an exact link (the part number, pixelated in the contest image, is an exact match!), as that took a little bit more research. Congrats, email me for your prize!

Tough one to judge, though; I suppose I asked for that by posting a relatively easy ware.

The ware for December 2024 is shown below.

This one should be a cakewalk, and I’m mostly sharing it because I had trouble searching for a recent example at an image quality sufficient to make out most of the part numbers. Maybe this can help someone else in a similar fix!

Warm wishes for a safe and happy new year to all!

The Ware for November 2024 is the NLP-16A by cherry-takuan. It’s a bespoke 16-bit CPU made entirely from 74HC00 NAND gates.

Even the D-flip flops are made from NAND gates:

Lots and lots of NAND gates…

I got to meet the maker, who goes by Cherry Takuan, at the Chiba Institute of Technology‘s 75th annual student festival. The NLP-16A was on display in a corner of the Denken electronics club (there’s also a rival club at the event, CITera). I was a little in disbelief at first, but after a bit of hemming and hawing I convinced myself this was in fact a full 16-bit CPU made out of nothing but NAND gates (the I/O card and RAM/ROM are separate). It’s double-cool in that the whole thing is up on github (here’s the schematics) and all the tooling (assembler, demo applications, etc.) are there as well. This was apparently a high school project that grew out of control and he’s now on his 6th year working on it. I wonder if he’d be interested in making a version in SKY130 with eFabless or TinyTapeout. Could stick with the “entirely NAND gate” theme, even in silicon, because why not?

I love this kind of stuff, and it’s heartening to know there’s still engineering students who have a hankering to build stuff out of nothing but NAND gates and solder — and will take the time to do it, instead of chasing the latest AI-crazed startup idea. In retrospect, I could grow into who I am today only because I cut my teeth on gritty projects like this (although not nearly as ambitious!), back when I was his age.

For example, above is a 48-bit wide VLIW audio DSP I made for a “6.111” lab project when I was an undergraduate at MIT…I “cheated” (compared to cherry-takuan’s all-7400 flex) and used some PLA devices, ROMs, and SRAMs to improve density. Unfortunately it was all breadboards so it was ripped up shortly after the class ended. This potato-quality photo is all I have left of it, but this was all pre-Internet, and about as good as we could do back then to preserve a design for sharing if you were a cash-strapped undergraduate with nothing but disposable film camera (remember those?).

Congrats to Alastair for nailing this one. Email me for your prize!

The Ware for November 2024 is shown below. Click on any image for a larger version.

I have a policy of never using one of my own projects for name that ware. But, sometimes I see another person’s project in the wild and it is just too cool not to share! I came across this ware recently and fell in love with it instantly. It’s the sort of thing I’ve always dreamed of doing, but didn’t have the resources to do it when I had the time, and when I finally had the resources, I no longer had the time.

The images for this month are somewhat redacted to make it a little more challenging, but … you might get an idea of what’s going on, and yah, it’s exactly that. How cool! I’ll share more details next month. My gut tells me one of my subscribers is going to have seen this thing somewhere already on the Internet, so I’m betting there will be an ID on it shortly in the comments, despite the redactions.