The Ware for January 2011 is shown below. Click on the image for a slightly larger version.
The ware this month is not nearly as hard as last month’s stumper. However, I was surprised by many of the clever features of this ware when I started investigating it in more detail, and thought it was worth sharing a high-res pic of the ware.
The ware for December 2010 is an Inmarsat receiver board. According to the submitter, the ware has notable a history:
This is the Inmarsat receiver used during the round-the-world balloon flight attempts by Steve Fossett and Richard Branson. It was located on the ground along with a whole rack full of related equipment. Some time ago a friend of a friend bought the whole lot on eBay, not really expecting to win. It took up a lot of space in his flat for a while, before being donated to the Dorkbot Alba electronics group. It is currently all taking up space in the Edinburgh Hacklab, if anybody wants it…
Here is the uncensored image of the board, along with a picture of the rack of equipment that went along with it:
For the first time in the history of Name that Ware, I do not have a clear winner. After the 70 MHz IF hint was posted, many homed in on it being a kind of satellite receiver front end. Many of the answers were also very thorough, so much that I couldn’t really declare a winner based solely upon quality and depth of analysis (which is my typical tie-breaking factor). As a result, I’m going to declare the reader who submitted this ware the winner — Martin Ling gets the prize this month for stumping the readers!
With the madness of CES over and the Chinese New Year holiday coming up, I finally found some time to catch up on some back issues of Science. I came across a beautiful diagram of the metabolic pathways of one of the smallest bacteria, Mycoplasma Pneumoniae. It’s part of an article by Eva Yus et al (Science 326, 1263-1271 (2009)).
Looking at this metabolic pathway reminds me of when I was less than a decade old, staring at the schematic of an Apple II. Back then, I knew that this fascinatingly complex mass of lines was a map to this machine in front of me, but I didn’t know quite enough to do anything with the map. However, the key was that a map existed, so despite its imposing appearance it represented a hope for fully unraveling such complexities.
The analogy isn’t quite precise, but at a 10,000 foot level the complexity and detail of the two diagrams feels similar. The metabolic schematic is detailed enough for me to trace a path from glucose to ethanol, and the Apple II schematic is detailed enough for me to trace a path from the CPU to the speaker.
And just as a biologist wouldn’t make much of a box with 74LS74 attached to it, an electrical engineer wouldn’t make much of a box with ADH inside it (fwiw, a 74LS74 (datasheet) is a synchronous storage device with two storage elements, and ADH is alcohol deydrogenase, an enzyme coded by gene MPN564 (sequence data) that can turn acetaldehyde into ethanol).
In the supplemental material, the authors of the paper included what reads like a BOM (bill of materials) for M. pneumoniae. Every enzyme (pentagonal boxes in the schematic) is listed in the BOM with its functional description, along with a reference that allows you to find its sequence source code. At the very end is a table of uncharacterized genes — those who do a bit of reverse engineering would be very familiar with such tables of “hmm I sort of know what it should do but I’m not sure yet” parts or function calls.
The Ware for December 2010 is shown below, click on the image for a much larger version.
This is a reader-submitted ware; thanks to Martin Ling of the Edinburgh Hacklab for the submission!
Happy New Year to everyone!
[edit: Nobody’s guessed the ware yet — first time this has happened — so I’ll add a hint. The silver box on the top left hand corner whose label has been blocked out is a precision 70 MHz oscillator by Vectron. Hope that helps!]
It’s impressive how much was deduced from just a tiny portion of a circuit board.
The ware for November 2010 is a Kingston KVR667DS2S5/2G DDR2 SO-DIMM. It’s a zoom in of the area between two DDR2 memory chips, where an I2C EEPROM would sit to help with module identification.
Picking a winner was difficult, but ultimately I’ll say it’s Paul Roukema for having the first mostly-correct answer. Congrats, email me for your prize!