The Ware for December 2021 is shown below:

Thanks to Nava Whiteford for once again contributing another interesting and challenging ware.

Happy holidays to everyone, and may your 2022 be an improvement over 2021!

The Ware for November 2021 is the controller PCB from a late ’80s vintage “Caroling Christmas Bells” set. As described by the contributor: “Basically it’s a string of twelve electromagnetically-actuated brass bells that play christmas songs. These seem to have been quite popular at the time as there’s hundreds of sets for sale on eBay right now. It’s pretty cool to see a novelty product like this implemented using discrete logic chips.”

Thanks again to jackw01 for contributing this seasonal ware!

I haven’t seen the ware myself, but I think Adam Robinson’s description is close enough to me to declare it a winner. Congrats, an email me for your prize!

The Ware for November 2021 is shown below.

This is another ware from jackw01, and I thought it was fitting for the season (that’s a hint, yes). The posting is a bit early this month because, good news: Precursor production is finally moving ahead! … and so, I may not have sufficient connectivity later this month to post at the usual time.

The Ware for October 2021 is a TFT liquid crystal display (with any luck, the image I uploaded & added to the entry was accepted by the Wikimedia editors). Congrats to Joe for guessing it first, email me for your prize! The ware itself was a pretty easy guess, but I was inspired to share it because the quality of the photography really spoke to me. The first thought that came to my head when I saw it was, “this should be in the encyclopedia entry for liquid crystal displays”. So, with jackw01‘s permission, I’ve tried to make it happen!

The Ware for October 2021 is shown below:

This one should be much easier to guess than last month’s ware; it’s strategically cropped to add a tiny bit of challenge to it. I’ll add some more views of the ware once we’ve got a correct answer.

I was really struck by the quality of the photography of this ware. jackw01 submitted a series of wares (this one included), which I’ll be sharing over the coming months. I have a lot to learn about photography, and I thought it might be of general interest to hear his answer on how this ware was photographed:

[The ware] was shot with a Fujifilm X-T30 using a 40-year-old Canon FD mount 50mm prime lens with a set of 10+16mm macro extension tubes. If you’re unfamiliar, extension tubes are basically a way of achieving macro photography without having a dedicated macro lens. They decrease the minimum focusing distance and increase the magnification of a lens according to the ratio between the length of the extension tube and the focal length of the lens, producing 1:1 magnification when the extension tube length equals the focal length. When using both the 10 and 16mm extension tubes together with the 18-55mm lens, my usable field of view is anywhere from 25-50mm wide depending on the focal length and focus distance with the subject ~0-20mm away from the lens, and with the 50mm prime, the field of view is 30-45mm wide with the subject 70-90mm away from the lens. When using extension tubes, I would highly recommend using manual focus, even though most extension tubes have the electrical connections to support autofocus – the autofocus algorithms on most cameras are just not tuned to work with extension tubes and often won’t focus at all or won’t produce as sharp of an image.

Thanks again to jackw01 for sharing this ware, and for sharing your know-how on photographing them!

Update Nov 5: the ware has been guessed as much as it can be (there is no expectation to guess the specific panel) so I thought I’d share these other images of the ware!

I think one of them might be be a great addition to the entries on TFTs or LCDs on Wikipedia.

I mentioned it to jackw01, and he said he’d be OK with sharing the photos using a Public Domain license and having them added — I’ll give that a try when I get a spare moment, if someone doesn’t get to it before I do!