The ware from March 2013 is a serial link card from a Kodak X-ray Medical Imaging Manager. As Julien was the first to identify it, he’s the winner, congrats and email me for your prize!
Sorry for the short synopsis of the ware, it’s been a busy month and I’m struggling to keep up…
No Starch Press and I have decided to release a free ebook version of Hacking the Xbox in honor of Aaron Swartz. As you read my book, I hope that you’ll be reminded of how important freedom is to the hacking community and that you’ll be inclined to support the causes that Aaron believed in.
Apologies in advance if there are any hiccups in the distribution of the free copy. The primary host is a server in my flat, which only has a 100Mbps up-link (currently pushing >30Mbps one hour after posting).
Today, March 11, marks the second anniversary of the Tohoku-Oki earthquake that devastated Japan and triggered the meltdown of Fukushima Daiichi. In a desire to help any way I could, I joined Safecast and created an open source Geiger counter reference design, which I released last year around this time.
Since then, Safecast launched a successful Kickstarter campaign, and International Medcom has completed the monumental tasks of tooling, testing, debugging, and developing firmware for this little device.
Above: the limited edition Kickstarter version of the Geiger counter in action.
Above: the steel tools used to injection mold the ventral case of the Geiger counter.
Finally, the clear, limited-edition Kickstarter devices are shipping. You can see some photos of them on the Make Blog as Eric Weinhoffer at Make is helping to put the finishing touch on every unit: a laser-cut, limited edition serial number on the back of each case.
Having shipped many products myself, I know how hard everyone has worked to make this a reality. Congrats guys!
If you donate to Safecast between now and 11:59 PM EDT tomorrow, March 11th, Global Giving will match your donation 200%. As long as funding remains, they’ll even match your donation 100% until March 15th. Click the image below to learn more and contribute to a great project.
The Ware for March 2013 is shown below. Click on the image for a larger version.
Thanks to Patricio Worthalter for contributing this month’s ware! The PCI Matchmaker from AMCC brings me back. I used one of those as part of my Master’s thesis, back in the day when FPGAs accessible by mere mortals couldn’t do PCI directly. Man, it was (and still is) a pain to properly obtain the official PCI bus specs…PCI is a member’s-only club, with a $3k annual fee. Ain’t nobody got dime fo’ that!
The Ware for February 2013 is the Worldsemi WS2812. It’s a digital-to-light converter — add +5V, ground, and shift in a digital code word, and out comes PWM RGB light. The chip also features a digital output for cascading multiple LEDs in a row. It’s an extremely versatile chip that was brought to my attention by Dave Cranor during the Shenzhen geek tour in January — one of those things that you just keep a stock of at all times because it’s a dirt simple way to add a beautiful-looking LED into a tight spot. You can buy ones mounted on a little PCB from Adafruit.
I’ll give Randy the prize this month, since he was the first to correctly identify the entire packaged ware, and also gave a link to a datasheet (which I had also been looking for). Thanks, and email me for your prize!