The Ware for August 2021 is shown below.

This months ware is probably a pretty easy guess. To make things a bit more interesting, the prize will go to the entry that has the most feasible (or the most entertaining!) theory as to the purpose for the tiny break-away, stand-alone PCB is on the left hand side, as indicated by the red arrow. The cropping just barely obscures the edge of the PCB, but basically there are three mouse bites on the edges that retain the sub-assembly PCB, so it could be sheared off and turned into a separate item. I always pay extra attention to blank spots like this PCBs, because they are riddles into some aspect of a product’s design or supply chain: someone put the effort in to design a thing — but then decided not to use it. This PCB has a lot of blank spots, but this is the only one that could be readily sheared off into a separate assembly.

This ware is also a guest ware, courtesy of “JeffA”. Thanks for the submission!

The Ware for July 2021 is a PC-60FW Fingertip Oximeter, which was distributed to each household in Singapore by the Temasek Foundation, free of charge. I thought this was a pretty interesting ware for a few reasons. First, it’s a free oximeter! Kind of a neat thing to play with. You can hold your breath and watch your SPO2 levels go down, or try to meditate and control your pulse.

Second, I found it quite interesting because no where on the box or the manual does it mention that this thing has Bluetooth. Of course, I take apart most things that arrive at my doorstep to see what’s inside — that’s just how I roll. Since it was a free device, I assumed it would probably be a bare-bones implementation, not expecting to see much more than a black glob of epoxy and a few wires when I opened it. Instead, it had these fairly name-brand components, and the antenna came as a bit of a shocker because I didn’t expect any sort of telemetry from the device. The box bears no indication of a radio transmitter — there’s no EMC-compliance notice, MAC address, icons, or any kind of verbiage that would typically compliment a radio transmitter. Must be nice to be able to ship millions of units of a product without having to deal with EMC compliance. After a careful inspection of the manual, however, there is a reference to the fact that you could download the “@Health” app, which includes a QR code to a random website to side-load an APK into your phone from “Shenzhen Creative”.

I’m not quite sure what was the thought behind including the Bluetooth function — it’s not cheap, especially for a nationwide-scale deployment. I would have assumed they were going to integrate this into their “Healthhub” app which is the official government app for managing healthcare, to allow them an opportunity to triage COVID cases before bringing them into the ward. However, I didn’t investigate the @Health app any further; it was served from a Chinese-style domain name I didn’t recognize, without https, etc. etc. I don’t have the time to deal with disassembling the app to make sure it’s clean before installing it, so I just steered clear of it. A Nordic Bluetooth radio on its own isn’t a perilous surveillance threat, due to its limited range and capability. However, once paired with a smartphone app, the scope of the data goes global and the threat is much more severe due to the potential for data fusion with the smartphone’s sensors, and other private data within.

Anyways, I found it a bit surprising that my pulse oximeter has a radio, and thought it’d be a neat ware to share!

This is a picture of the “less-interesting” side of the oximeter PCB. It uses the same OLED display that found its way into the $12 Shanzhai phones from the turn of the millennium. That characteristic cyan-and-amber color scheme seems to be the “go-to” display for budget-conscious IoT devices these days.

Bienvenu is the clear winner on guessing this one, congrats! email me for your prize.

The Ware for July 2021 is shown below.

For well over a year now, I haven’t traveled much further than 10km from where I sit and write this. However, sometimes the world brings you interesting things. This ware has a little bit of a story behind it; it arrived, and of course I popped off the cover to see what was inside. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting to see — more on that, after we’ve given some time for people to share their guesses! I imagine this could be a fairly easy one to guess, as most of the components involved in its core functionality are in this view.

The Ware for June 2021 is an Amplifier Research AR200L 200W linear power amp. This is the last (for now at least) of the very fine set of wares that Don Straney had contributed. Thanks, Don! They helped get me through the pandemic, until I can travel the world again and stumble across new wares. Unfortunately, the delta variant means any hope of travel in the near term is probably off the table. But! I still have a screw driver, so I’ll be scouring my place for interesting things to photograph and share.

I’ll pick Phantom Deadline as the winner for last month’s competition, congrats and email me for your prize! I found the comment thread to be very interesting to read; I’m a decade too young to have learned how to design with vacuum tubes in college, and I never picked up tube design later on. For me, at least, I had no idea what I was staring at when I saw the ware initially. So, I appreciated the discussion of vacuum tube RF design tricks. Thanks to everyone who commented, for teaching me new things!

The Ware for June 2021 is shown below.

This is, I think, the last from the Don Straney collection (thank you so much for helping to bridge me through the pandemic!). Maybe I’m showing a bit too much here to make it hard to guess, but, honestly, I had never seen the inside of one of these types of things before, and I probably never will in person; so I wanted to share more than less of its construction details. It’s kind of crazy what a rat’s nest it is on the inside; I particularly love the tiny loops of wire which I’m pretty sure are meant to serve as inductive elements, and not just jumpers.