The ware for January 2009 is shown below. Click on the images for a larger version.

I figured since I was running so far behind on posts that I’d just do two this month to catch myself up.

This ware is a bit of a puzzler that was brought to me by Mike Fitzmorris. I love tubes of all kinds, but this one is a bit of an oddity. I did some googling about and found spec sheets and part numbers for it, so I know what it is but I don’t know what it’s for. In particular, why did the engineers of this tube spend the effort to make the face hexagonal? Seems ideal for tiling in an array of some type, but I can only speculate why. Would love to hear your thoughts!

The ware for December 2008 is shown below. Click on the images for a much larger version.

This ware — incredibly late due to CES and me having the flu for the past week — is from The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk. I love the idea of TGIMBOEJ; I’ve just been terribly delinquent about doing my part, which is writing up something about it and then passing it on. I’m going to add some tasty fun parts to the box and send it on to the next victim…any volunteers?

The ware from November 2008 was a Sicortex CPU node from one of their older machines. Some nifty facts about the board —

Module (27 6-way SMP CPUs + 54 DDR2 DIMMs) is powered by 10A/48V, with 68 software-visible temperature sensors.

The fabric connectors have 702 differential pairs running at 2 GHz mesochronous; insertion force is 120+ pounds. Now that’s what I’m talking about! Master Knight (who taught me everything I know about computers) had a saying: “It’s the wires, stupid!” (or connectors in this case). This is a nice array of connectors.

Module weight, fully populated, is greater than 25 pounds; the PCB is 0.122″ thick and it has 24 layers.

My kinda ware. Thanks again to Bobby Woods-Corwin for sharing this beautiful piece of hardware.

Oh, and the winner: Joe Bleau! Nice work on nailing down the module. I’m always impressed at how fast people guess these wares. email me to claim your prize!

The Ware for November 2008 is shown below. Click on the photo for a much larger version.

This is again a reader submitted ware. I have Bobby Woods-Corwin, one of my old college roomies, to thank for submitting this photo. This is actually a very pretty board, and I have other shots of it but I think they would give away a little too much about where it comes from to make this an interesting competition.

Apologies for the lateness of this Ware…there’s this little show called CES coming up and pretty much every moment I have is being spent preparing a certain demo for the show. If you happen to be going to CES this year, stop by booth Central 14448 during the afternoons, you might find me there…or maybe you can help me look for a stiff drink later in the night.

I better get the next ware queued up already — December is almost over! Plus, I’m behind on judging the previous months’ ware, but I promise to get to that — prizes will get distributed, albeit a little late.