The Wares for September 2010 are shown below.

Ware A:

Ware B:

So I’ve decided to mix up the format a bit: instead of photographing the entire body of an obscure ware, I’m going to try for the next couple of months to show a photo of a magnified portion of a very common ware. The challenge is to figure out what is the type or function of the common ware that this magnified portion belongs to. The photographed regions are all picked so that a reasonably specific and correct solution can be derived if you are paying attention to all the details.

Because I don’t know how hard this will be, I’ve decided to include two photos this time of completely unrelated wares, just in case one is totally unguessable, or if one is just way too trivial. This complicates judging a bit, but basically someone who can guess both will be picked over someone who can just guess one.

The Ware for August 2010 was an MSO-9212 by Link Instruments, a dual-channel mixed signal oscilloscope with 200 MHz analog bandwidth and a built-in logic analyzer as well. The full circuit board is shown below:

I picked up the MSO-9212 because I’ve been on the road so much and there’s too many scenarios where you just need an oscilloscope or a logic analyzer and you can’t afford to wait until you get back home. The MSO-9212 is mechanically robust so I have no problem checking it, since when I travel through Hong Kong they are very strict about not letting unusual or pointy metal objects of any size through security (totally irrational policy, since one hour later you’re going to be handed a metal knife to eat your meal on the plane).

The analog fidelity of the scope doesn’t compare to my Tek scope, so I have to use some judgement before using the MSO’s output to debug a subtle analog issue, but it’s great for quickly validating hardware that’s acting funky in the field — making sure the oscillators are humming and that the boost regulators aren’t rippling too much, for example. And, the logic analyzer can capture a ton of state so if you’re tracking down a pesky SPI, I2C or SDIO issue, it’s quite handy for that too.

And, the winner for August 2010 is Devlin — congrats. It was actually tough to pick a winner because there were so many thoughtful comments and analysis in the responses, but Devlin pretty much guessed it from the get-go and nobody’s guess got substantially closer over time.

This has to be one of the coolest retro-hardware projects I’ve seen in a while. It’s a transistor-level simulator of the 6502, written in Javascript, that visually simulates the device based on its original mask pattern — painstakingly reverse-engineered from high-resolution die photographs. Fortunately, mask works have a “sane” copyright term of only a decade, so cool projects like this are facilitated through such reasonable limitations on copyright lifetimes.

Click the image above to take you to the live simulator. As it runs, the wires dynamically change color on a cycle-by-cycle basis as the logic states of each wire update.

It makes my head spin to think that the CPU from the first real computer I used, the Apple II, is now simulateable at the mask level as a browser plug-in. Nothing to install, and it’s Open-licensed. How far we have come…a little more than a decade ago, completing a project like this would have resulted in a couple PhDs being awarded, or regarded as trade secret by some big EDA vendor. This is just unreal…but very cool!