I almost forgot to mention this! You can get a 2013 Name that Ware calendar now at cafepress. Note that since we don’t yet have the full set of 2012 wares and winners, the photos for 2013 are still from 2011, but next year I’ll make a 2014 calendar using 2012 photos.
Name that Ware November 2012
November 28th, 2012The ware for November 2012 is shown below.
This one should also be an easy guess, but I’m posting it because I think it’s cute and quaint, and I haven’t found any decent high-res photos of this mainboard alone on the web.
Winner, Name That Ware October 2012
November 28th, 2012As expected, the ware for October 2012 was imminently guessable. Julien Lefort got it within minutes of the ware going up, congratulations and email me to claim your prize!
I thought it was noteworthy that the H.264 Pro Recorder’s mainboard has components on only one side — the designers opted to not put any components on the back side, not even decoupling capacitors (I tend to use underside-mounted decaps to minimize lead lengths to the IC die). Counterbalancing that is what appears to be blind/buried micro-via construction of the PCB itself. It’s an interesting and unique design methodology. The overall design is very clean, my guess is the hardware design team was located in a single facility in the US or Europe, and the layout was probably done in-house.
One man’s trash…
November 10th, 2012I was wandering around the Hua Qian Bei district yesterday with xobs trying to buy a couple of power supplies for bringup of an open-source quad-core ARM laptop we’re building, and lo and behold, I came across this:
It’s the first time I’ve ever come across one of my former products in the Shenzhen markets. It’s kind of neat because I have intimate knowledge of how it might have ended up at this reseller’s stall. It also brought back old memories of agonizing over the logo color and placement — I think we tested over a half-dozen shades of gray before we settled on this one, and we had to fight with the printer to get the eyes just right and no smearing despite printing on a curved surface (accessories are in many ways harder than the product itself). Amusingly, this lady is selling the power supply for less than it cost us to originally buy it (you can just see the top of her head in the photo, she ducked behind the counter to find the power supplies we were buying, and I snapped the photo while she wasn’t looking).
Most of the excess inventory for this power supply ended up in the US office to handle exchanges & returns, so I’m pretty sure these are from a batch of power supplies that we had rejected. If I recall correctly, I had discovered an issue where one of the inductors in the power supply was missing the glob of glue required to hold it in place. Shipping the unit subjected the power supply to vibration, which caused the inductor to rub against a neighboring part. The rubbing could wear off the enamel on the inductor, which ultimately leads to the inductor shorting against the neighboring part. The power supply’s internal fuse correctly blows when this happens, so it wasn’t a safety issue; but the defectivity rate was around a few percent after shipping. I think a few thousand power supplies were sent back to the manufacturer over that issue. My guess is that after many years, the manufacturer finally found a sucker^H^H^H^H^H^H reseller who would peddle it in the markets.
Inspires confidence in the other ‘brand-name’ power supplies she was peddling, doesn’t it? On the other hand, I did buy a Lenovo-branded power supply that was perfect for my needs. ‘Brand new’ with plastic over the logos, it set me back only $4 a piece, and I did verify on the spot using a multimeter that the power supply did output the correct voltage. Probably good enough for development use, and at that price you just buy two in case one breaks.
Name that Ware, October 2012
October 30th, 2012The Ware for October 2012 is shown below.
I’ll set aside the collection of stumper retro-wares from my childhood basement for a bit and give you this modern ware to ponder. This one should be guessable, especially since I left all the telltale connectors in the photo.
Sorry about the infrequent posts this past couple of months, but I’ve been spending a good chunk of my time as an intern at a local infectious disease research lab. I’ve been hacking the E. coli chromosome, swapping out genes and observing its impact on various regulatory pathways. It’s been very interesting, and has really helped calibrate my intuition on many aspects of biology that I’ve read about, but until now had not reduced to practice. I did a genomic DNA extraction protocol the other day and it was pretty magical seeing DNA precipitate out of solution into wispy white strands (the E. coli chromosome is about 5 million base pairs in size, and these huge molecules quickly glob together into strands visible with the naked eye). It’s also been fun writing simple bioinformatic analysis tools to help sort through various genetic motifs. DNA is way more structured than I had previously thought — feels almost as structured as raw binary machine code — and short snippets of DNA (a few hundred bits worth) can implement proteins with surprisingly sophisticated functions.
So many things to learn…!