The Ware for January 2026 is shown below:

Enjoy!

[update: added photo of top side, since the ware was already guessed – just for more enjoyment]

The Ware for December 2025 is a Spectral Instruments Series 800 camera. I was pretty shocked at how quickly this was guessed given the very small portion of the instrument that was shown, but, then again – that’s how it goes sometimes. Congrats to johslarsen for nailing this one; email me for your prize.

I had prepared a series of “hint” images in case it turned out to be too hard to guess the ware – they’re too neat not to share, so here they are:

The module above is the “other half” of the assembly – you can see the tips of the pogo pins peeking through the metal shield that press into the mating pins in the original image, shown again below for reference:

The white square in the center of the “other half” is a thermo electric cooler (TEC) stack which presses onto the lavender-colored ceramic sensor, visible through the round cut-out in the PCB above, via a spring-loaded heat pipe of some kind. The chamber containing the TEC and sensor are kept in a vacuum – the whole thing was difficult to take apart because even after a decade in storage, there was still a decent vacuum in the chamber; only after I took a mallet to it and heard the hiss of air rushing in did the whole thing pop apart.

The physical construction is a prime example of no-expense-spared engineering – a C-shape assembly made out of three PCBs, surrounding a set of plumbing that I think is for vacuum and cooling. The whole assembly seems to be engineered around the principle of getting a sensor as cold as possible without resorting to cryogenics, with little concern for power consumption, size, or cost. The actual image sensor itself is glued to a fiber optic block weighing over a kilogram that is ~10cm long. The block transmits light while serving as a thermal barrier to the sample material at ambient, or perhaps even elevated, temperatures.

This is all part of a Roche 454 DNA sequencer that I took part a while ago. There were an enormous number of fascinating bits and bobs inside the beast, but the TL;DR is it’s basically a grad student’s optical bench, complete with an optical breadboard and its array of drilled/tapped holes, that got stuck in a cosmetic case with minimal cost reduction.

Perhaps I got an early-production run unit, but also, probably only hundreds to thousands of these were ever made, which is not enough volume to work through and streamline all the production kinks on an instrument this complicated. I’m guessing that in practice, no two units were exactly alike. The camera module that was last month’s ware, however, was an “off the shelf” sub-component that was probably made in larger numbers.

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 off the bat, I’ll add some more hints in a couple of weeks.

Happy holidays!

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 mated to the controller: basically a big relay that can cut power to the room when the card is pulled out.

I’ll give Greg the prize, since he was the first to basically guess the ware. However, I never considered the possibility that the snap-action switch could be an anti-tamper mechanism. Maybe that’s what it is for? My assumption was that the switch is what’s used to turn on the RFID circuit to check for the presence of an RFID antenna. Given the simplicity of the components and the lack of an obvious way to synchronize the card’s code to a central server, I actually suspect the device can’t even read the card: it just checks for the presence of a tuned RFID load, so that you can’t keep power on in the room by jamming a random business card into the slot.

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 her feet and snatching this board so that it could be donated to the contest!