The Ware for December 2025 is shown below. This is just one part of a much more complex ware, but I thought I’d throw just this photo out there for starters because it’s one of the more thought-provoking portions of the ware. Super curious to see what people come up with! If nobody guesses it […]

The Ware for November 2025 is a controller from the card-activated power switch in a hotel room. It was on the fritz, and when the repair person came and replaced it, Sam asked for the old module and brought it to me as a name that ware entry. Here’s the other circuit board that was […]

The Ware for November 2025 is shown below. This one is hopefully a bit easier to guess compared to last month’s ware! Pictured is just one board of a two board set, but the second board is a bit too much of a dead give-away so it’s been omitted. Thanks to Sam for thinking on […]

Last month’s ware is an ADAS1010, described on the Analog devices website as a “15 Lead ECG Vital Signs Monitor Module with Respiration, Temperature and Blood Pressure Measurement”. It advertises a “robust, with electromagnetic interference (EMI), shock, and vibration resistant packaging”. This is one of the more over-engineered solutions I’ve seen. I’m guessing that the […]

The Ware for October 2025 is shown below. Thanks to Juan C. for contributing this curious ware! I really can’t get enough of how the whole device is integrated with a multi-layer stacked PCB. I imagine that inside the middle of the stack there could be some interesting circuitry going on, too. I redacted one […]

The Ware from September 2025 is a Hotronic AF 75 time base corrector. Really great comment thread, it was fun to read the sleuthing work and thought process behind the guesses. And yah, those SRAM chips make me nostalgic – I remember how expensive those were! Back when 32kiB cost real money. A couple folks […]

The Ware for September 2025 is shown below. Thanks to Michael Dwyer for submitting this ware! I originally contemplated only showing the digital board to make the ware more challenging, but the analog part is so chaotically gorgeous I had to share it out of the aesthetic appreciation. Despite the size and complexity of the […]

The Ware for August 2025 is the Superboard II from an Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P. Congrats to Tibor Bartos for naming it. Email me for your prize!

Here’s a quick tip for people learning how to solder small components: don’t rely on your eyes. Instead, solder by touch: use the force-feedback available through your fingertips. Human fingers can reliably detect bumps on the order of microns in size – much finer than the resolution of sight, even with the assistance of a […]

The Ware for August 2025 is shown below. Thanks to Curtis Galloway for contributing this bit of nostalgia! This board has the look of one that was laid out by hand using masking tape or rubylith – back in the day before computers became affordable and powerful enough to regularly use them for making new […]

The Ware for July 2025 is a Vernier Lab Pro. While researching the ware with FETguy, we noticed that the OEM for the product is probably Inventec, which also made a line of products for TI calculators at the time. That particular OEM design team applied its design language in several products. I’ll give the […]

The Ware for July 2025 is shown below: Thanks to FETguy and Renew Computers in San Rafael, California for contributing this ware!

The Ware for June 2025 is a Gentner EFT-900A frequency shifter for radio audio applications. According to Chris Combs, “it lets two parties send and receive ‘full-range audio’, whatever that means, compressed and then decompressed via the usual 300-3500hz phone line”. Even though Per named the ware first, I will give the prize to Kienan […]

The ware for June 2025 is shown below. A big thanks to Chris Combs for this handsome contribution! Despite being 80’s vintage, the board is in mint condition.

The Ware for May 2025 is a Facebook (now Meta) Portal. I’ll give the prize to opticron for the quick guess, email me for your prize! I actually considered redacting the audio DSP, but decided to leave it in because it’s an interesting detail. Despite having a big burly SoC with multiple cores and a […]

The Ware for May 2025 is shown below. Because I really like to be able to read the part numbers on all the parts, here’s a couple more detail images of portions that didn’t photograph clearly in the above images. This ware was donated to me by someone in person, but unfortunately the post-it note […]

The Ware for April 2025 is two digits out of a TI-55 calculator display. The full display assembly and calculator IC can be seen below. This was my father’s old calculator that he got back in 1979, which I recently recovered and lightly modified so that I could power it from a USB plug. I […]

The Ware for this month is shown below: It’s a tiny portion of a much larger ware, but for various reasons I think this is sufficient for someone to guess at least the type of ware this came from, if not the exact make/model. There’s a particularly interesting bit about this ware, which you can […]

The Ware for March 2025 is part of a Wekome WP-U157 “67 watt” GAN power supply. This particular unit had overheated and let out the magic smoke, so I decided to take it apart to understand what was going on. There were a number of engineering issues with the design; the most prominent of which […]