The winner of September 2008’s Name that Ware is Peter Knight, for correctly guessing the ware within one hour of it being posted(!). Congrats, and email me to claim your prize. Thanks again to tmbinc for the user-submitted ware! Along with the submission, he had these interesting comments about the ware:

The reason why I think this is interesting is that this device is in a way unique as that it doesn’t have any other IOs except for USB. It acts truly as a coprocessor, offloading H.264 encoding from the PC. Basically it appears (with the correct software) as a quicktime codec, and allows you for example to recompress DVDs for an iPod much faster than a PC could do. Well, with today’s CPUs, it’s not much faster anymore, but my old PowerBook gets to a pretty decent encoding speed thanks to this gadget. In operation (I sniffed the USB bus for fun), you just upload uncompressed frames, and then read the compressed bitstream back.

The Ware for September 2008 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.

This is another user-submitted ware, this time from tmbinc. Thanks for the submission! Beautiful photo as well. Hopefully some readers will find this game a positive distraction from all that bad news about the economy…

The ware from August 2008 is an Ovonics CMOS image sensor, specifically, the OV7670. This part is used in a VGA camera assembly, of the type found in notebooks and cell phones. These things are unbelievably cheap, around $2 in production volume, and very convenient to use — they have a glueless, direct digital interface. I was taking apart one of these modules to strip out the IR filter, when I cut too deeply into the glue that held the assembly together and knocked the chip off of the PCB. So, it ended up under my microscope and on Name that Ware.

Most CMOS image sensors have sensitivity well into the IR spectrum, so typically camera modules ship with an IR filter installed to prevent image colors from being distorted by stray IR light. However, if you can remove the IR filter, the camera is sort of usable for night vision applications, especially if it is combined with an active IR emitter array. It turns out that it’s surprisingly easy to pry the IR filter out and button up the module again, once you know how deep to cut. I’m thinking about maybe modding my Blackberry’s camera by removing its IR filter, and replacing the white LED flash unit with an IR LED flash so that I can take halfway-decent pictures in the dark, albeit in monochrome.

Picking a winner for last month’s competition is difficult, because so many answers were basically correct. For lack of a better reason, J. Peterson is the winner because he correctly identified the RGGB pattern of gels as a Bayer filter pattern. I was actually wondering what the correct term was for that filter pattern, so thanks! And congratulations, email me to claim your prize!

The ware for August 2008 is below. Click on the image for a larger version.

I believe the corner die shot above has all the information you’ll need to guess what this does! I don’t expect anyone can guess the exact model number but big bonus points to anyone who can use some of the cues in the photo to guess the maker of the product.

Good guesses from everyone who played last month! Frankly, when I got this user-submitted ware, I was stumped myself. I was thinking nobody would guess it exactly, but the last entry from Keegan is dead-on correct: it is a touch screen lighting control console, by ETC Products. A lot of people had guessed home automation or HVAC controls, and in fact they were quite close to being correct with those guesses. What I want to know is how did Keegan know this:

“Unison has a unique labeling style (everything has a ‘Tested By’ sticker, every programmable chip has a thermal label with version and checksum)”.

That’s a very interesting piece of knowledge, and a great clue. Good job! email me to claim your prize.

Thanks everyone for playing!