The Ware for January 2011 is a BluRay optical pick-up head. There aren’t too many good photos of these on the web, although I did find a fascinating tear-down of the unit used inside a Sony PS3 from 2007. This particular unit is from a Lite-On OEM module manufactured on October 15 2009, from an HP BD-2000 BluRay player. Below is a photo of the motherboard from the BD-2000 player.

One notable features of the pickup-head is that the entire optics assembly — the piece with two lenses on it molded out of white plastic — “floats” on six whiskers of wire. Three of the whiskers are visible in the front. The entire assembly is buttressed by a set of voice coils that manipulate the assembly’s position by pushing against adjacent fixed permanent magnets. If you take a pair of tweezers and poke the assembly it jiggles freely. The mechanical design ingenuity and manufacturing tolerance that goes into making this is impressive, especially for a low-cost mass-market item.

Back when I designed nanophotonic integrated circuits at Luxtera, we had a problem with aligning single-mode fibers to grating couplers on the surface of a wafer. The single mode fiber alignment problem typically requires expensive manufacturing equipment and highly trained operators to get the laser lined up in three dimensions to within a micron of the optimal launch spot, after which the whole assembly is glued in place. This is a bummer, because if the glue shifts during setting or the operator makes a mistake, a very expensive optical assembly is lost.

Thus, I find it amusing that this low-cost assembly can do that and more, on the fly. According to this white paper, an optics assembly like this can achieve a tracking error of 8 nanometers on an assembly that’s moving around, thus allowing dynamic tracking of the laser spot onto media with a track pitch of 320 nm, much smaller than the micron or so spot size of a single mode fiber.

As for the winner this month, it’s Felix. I actually learned quite a bit reading his entry; for example, I didn’t know that the circle segments on the PCB were for ESD management. Thanks for the detailed lesson. Congrats, email me for your prize!

The Ware for January 2011 is shown below. Click on the image for a slightly larger version.

The ware this month is not nearly as hard as last month’s stumper. However, I was surprised by many of the clever features of this ware when I started investigating it in more detail, and thought it was worth sharing a high-res pic of the ware.

The ware for December 2010 is an Inmarsat receiver board. According to the submitter, the ware has notable a history:

This is the Inmarsat receiver used during the round-the-world balloon flight attempts by Steve Fossett and Richard Branson. It was located on the ground along with a whole rack full of related equipment. Some time ago a friend of a friend bought the whole lot on eBay, not really expecting to win. It took up a lot of space in his flat for a while, before being donated to the Dorkbot Alba electronics group. It is currently all taking up space in the Edinburgh Hacklab, if anybody wants it…

Here is the uncensored image of the board, along with a picture of the rack of equipment that went along with it:

For the first time in the history of Name that Ware, I do not have a clear winner. After the 70 MHz IF hint was posted, many homed in on it being a kind of satellite receiver front end. Many of the answers were also very thorough, so much that I couldn’t really declare a winner based solely upon quality and depth of analysis (which is my typical tie-breaking factor). As a result, I’m going to declare the reader who submitted this ware the winner — Martin Ling gets the prize this month for stumping the readers!

The Ware for December 2010 is shown below, click on the image for a much larger version.

This is a reader-submitted ware; thanks to Martin Ling of the Edinburgh Hacklab for the submission!

Happy New Year to everyone!

[edit: Nobody’s guessed the ware yet — first time this has happened — so I’ll add a hint. The silver box on the top left hand corner whose label has been blocked out is a precision 70 MHz oscillator by Vectron. Hope that helps!]