The Ware for March 2009 is a Philips electric shaver. Context is everything, I guess — the people who guessed electric toothbrush were definitely in the right genre of ware, but John H had the benefit of experience in having taken apart and seen the guts of his own Philips electric shaver. The terminals were the give-away that I tried to include, and John H called them out. Congrats, email me to claim your prize!

Just so you can see some more context, a larger view of the assembly is below.

Nobody guessed how this ware met its end correctly, but that was an oddball case. It didn’t meet its end drowning in water or meeting a high voltage outlet it didn’t like, nor did it suffer a mechanical jam that overloaded the circuits (although those were good guesses). This one met its end quietly charging on my bathroom counter. The beginning of the end, however, was on the cobblestone streets of Italy, I’m guessing. On my way to Roma Termini, I had to run to catch the train, while dragging my suitcase behind me on the cobblestone streets. The shaver was unfortunately packed near the bottom of the suitcase where it would get the full impact of being dragged across a quarter mile of Italian cobblestone. 24 hours later I got home and tried to use the shaver, and it didn’t work.

I shook the shaver around a bit and the motor briefly engaged, so I figured I’d give it a charge. About a half hour later I come back to the bathroom to find that the shaver is smoking hot! I unplug the shaver right away, but it wasn’t cooling off — I feared the battery was in thermal runaway. I stripped off the casing and sprayed the whole thing down with freeze spray (fortunately I keep such things around). When I inspected the device, it turns out that the battery terminals, which are thin sheets of metal spot-welded onto the ends of the battery, had sheared due to the vibration the shaver was exposed to. Probably some intermittent contact was happening such that the charge circuit behaved badly and caused the battery to overheat, eventually causing the large brown scar you see on the waterproof coating of the circuit board.

The Ware for March 2009 is shown below. Click the photo for a much larger version.

This ware is interesting because it’s the guts of an appliance that I owned that nearly caught fire. The dark brown tint of the epoxy overcoat is evidence of its smokey demise. Bonus points for anyone who can correctly guess what instigated the death of this ware.

The Ware for February 2009 is a P202 wifi telephony handset made for the company “Talk4free”, which actually I don’t know much about, except that it’s out of business, and that there’s a pile of these sitting in a factory in China. I was personally a bit surprised to see the all-Agere chipset — Agere is not really a leader in the wifi space. Plus, it’s using some fairly exotic memory chips (K1S3216B, a 32Mbit pseudo-SRAM). It reminds me a bit of another product I took apart once but didn’t feature on the blog (maybe I should?…hmm, I was going to draw some comparisons but now that I think about it I should save this one for later, because I’m not finding many google hits on it). Most of the part number markings and the PCB date code indicate the device was built in late 2005, so this design had been kicking around for a while. Too bad the corpse of this product can’t reveal any deeper secrets about what went wrong at the company that invested in its design; it’s always sad to see aborted products, as there’s nothing more frustrating for me than to pour my effort into a product that never sees the light of day.

Picking a winner is hard, since a lot of people guessed the type of ware correctly. I’ll more or less arbitrarily pick Brendan as the winner, since he guessed with the most detailed answer first and also took a stab at the business model behind the phone. Congrats, email me for your prize!