The Ware for June 2016 is shown below.
Thanks to Liwei from TinyMOS for contributing the ware. He found it on his way to school many years ago. The function of this board is probably an easy guess, so bonus points to anyone who has a convincing idea about the larger system this was once a part of.
The Ware for May 2016 was guessed within the hour of posting — it’s an Antminer S1 (v1.4 mainboards) from BitMainTech.
Tracing through the rapid-fire guesses and picking a winner was a bit of a convoluted process. Based on my primary criteria of awarding to the first person to home in on a make/model of a ware, the winner is Wouter’s post at 10:15PM (congrats, btw email me for your prize).
However, if make/model isn’t guessed, I’d go with an alternate criteria of thoughtful analysis, which would give the prize to Richard Ames’ conclusion that it’s a cryptocurrency compute module posted at 10:06PM. However, even that decision is contracted by 0x3d’s post at 9:53PM, earlier than all the rest, that this is an ASIC cryptocoin miner — no make/model, but still the correct genre.
Also, in response to Richard Ames’ question: HDB = Housing Development Board. It’s the colloquial term in Singapore for public housing, after the government agency in charge of managing public housing.
WIRED is now running a multi-part video documentary on Shenzhen:
This shoot was a lot of fun, and it was a great pleasure working with Posy and Jim. I think their talent as producer and director really show through. They also did a great job editing my off-the-cuff narratives. The spot in the video where I’m pointing out Samsung parts isn’t matched to the b-roll of Apple parts, but in their defense I was moving so fast through the market that Jim couldn’t capture all the things I was pointing at.
I haven’t seen the whole documentary myself (I was just called in to give some tours of the market and answer a few questions in my hotel room), so I’m curious and excited to see where this is going! Especially because of the text chosen for printing during my Moore’s Law explanation at 3:13 — “ALL PROPRIETARY AND NO OPEN SOURCE MAKES INNOVATION A SLOW PROCESS.”
:)
The Ware for May 2016 is shown below.
Xobs discovered this morsel of technology sitting in the junk pile at his HDB, and brought it into the office for me to have a look at. I hadn’t seen of these first-hand until then.
Despite being basically a picture of two large hunks of metal, I’m guessing this ware will be identified within minutes of going up.
Really great participation this month in Name that Ware!
The Ware for April 2016 is a “LED-Handbrause” by miomare — in other words, a shower head with LEDs on the inside which tell you the temperature of the water. It has an integral paddlewheel that generates power for the circuitry via water flowing through the shower head, as evidenced by this more complete photo of the ware:
It looks like LW was the first to guess the function of the ware, so congrats! email me for your prize. And thanks again to Philipp Gühring for submitting a ware that sparked so much interesting discussion!