The Ware for August 2022 is shown below.
Yet another contribution from jackw01! I had always been curious about these and I thought it was really neat to get a peek inside. It’s interesting how tightly integrated things are becoming – a single tiny black box that does magical things. I hope we collectively never forget what goes into everyday things, or else they may go the way of the Antikythera Mechanism.
What the heck uses a 10-pad edge connector? The best I can come up with is “SFP transceiver” but those typically aren’t potted….
Looks like the top half might be the backside of some kind of sensor that is partially obscured by the potting, and the lower half a MCU to read from it.
I am going to take a wild guess: The sensing element for the laser assembly on an optical disk drive.
Optical mouse sensor.
http://electronupdate.blogspot.com/2016/10/optical-mouse-teardown-look-at-sensor.html
I think you beat Adam for speed of guessing these! Wonderful!
What is really fascinating about those sensors is while this particular and all the modern ones are CMOS camera + DSP, the first real Optical mouse sensor that came out of HP (pre HP Agilent spin off) was fully ANALOG :o
US Patent 5,729,008. Interview with inventor: Oral History of Travis Blalock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmqa9XJED-Q https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2018/10/102717371-05-01-acc.pdf
“each array element had nearest neighbor connectivity so you would calculate nine correlations,
an autocorrelation and eight cross-correlations, with each of your eight nearest neighbors, the
diagonals and the perpendicular, and then you could interpolate in correlation space where the
best fit was.”
all in analog domain. Pretty amazing.
The form factor looks like from a Playstation Memory Card not made by Sony but from a Chinese vendor.