The Ware for May 2022 is shown below:

If you’re like me, you’re wondering where the month of May went. I guess that’s what you get for spending too much time writing software.

This one is a quickie that I grabbed out of my scrap pile. The photo is cropped to try and make it slightly more challenging, but, there should also be enough details left to unequivocally identify the original equipment from which this was extracted.

The ware for April 2022 is part of a tx/rx module for putting video and audio over a single optical fiber. As noted by Don Straney, the contributor of the ware:

This was being used to remotely feed a video signal to a projector in an MRI setup, for neuroscience experiments (although these likely had many more uses than that). Usually the projector has to sit in an awkward corner somewhere, just outside the shielded room, to get the right angle to project straight down the scanner’s bore and off a screen or mirror in front of the subject’s face, while the researchers are sitting in the control room 40 feet or so away, with the entire shielded room between them and the projector – this makes for some long cable runs.

It was actually interesting to see the system that they were part of, because it looked like a very “cottage industry” low-volume sort of thing; seemed pretty professional from the outside, but the internals were a hacked-together combo of 3rd-party boards like these ones, with wires soldered on to tap into power and the any pushbutton controls, and a little bit of custom stuff to power all the 3rd-party devices from a common power supply and “press” their onboard buttons as needed to make it a clean self-contained system.

Interestingly, the name on the board identifies the manufacturer as “Communication Specialties, Inc.”:

However, Black Box seems like the type of company that would OEM many of its products, so maybe that’s just the name of the OEM or a company they acquired. So, I’ll give the prize to Matt for — somehow — figuring out where this design came from. Congrats, email me for your prize!

The Ware for April 2022 is shown below.

This is once again another fine Don Straney ware; thank you for the contribution!

The Ware for March 2022 is the front-end electronics module for a Sony (now Magnescale) BL55 laser scale. The winner is Eben Olson (congrats, email me for your prize!), but Willmore guessed the full model number after the “interesting half” was also posted (I’m impressed!). It’s pretty amazing how a full laser interferometer is packed into such a tiny package; it’s the sort of thing that I wouldn’t believe was possible until I saw it with my own eyes.

The Ware for March 2022 is shown below.

This is arguably only “half” of the ware, and the much less interesting half at that. If folks struggle to guess the entire function, I’ll edit this post to include an image of the other half of the ware, which will probably end up being a dead give-away.

Either way, I’ll eventually update this post to show the whole ware, because it’s a pretty interesting little device.

Edit— Eben Olson got about as close as anyone can get on the ware without showing the other half! So, I’ll reveal it now. I think in practice nobody could guess the exact model number since this this specific unit has been EOL for a while. Pretty fascinating bit of optics, I’ll have to say; there’s a lot of art in this device.

I’m guessing this is the sort of thing I couldn’t buy new in Asia right now without filling out a bunch of export control forms, given the harassment I’ve experienced trying to acquire other advanced test and measurement equipment lately. It’s exactly the type of technology that would be strategic to control in a trade war: it’s essential in the construction of semiconductor fab equipment, plus I wouldn’t be surprised if there was only one or two sources capable of producing a laser scale of this quality, compactness, and clean room-readiness.