Winner, Name that Ware April 2021

Somehow, this didn’t get posted when I hit the post button, and I never noticed! I just saw that the new ware was up and assumed this went through as well. Sorry about that!

The boards from April 2021 were from a Bruker NMS120 benchtop NMR analyzer — according to the contributor of the ware, they “generate RF output to the power amp, digitize (downconverted) RF input, and generate some extra control signals”.

I’m always pleased when I manage to blur a logo just enough that you can’t Google image search it, yet it’s somehow recognizable to humans. Someday machines will beat us at this game but, for now, maybe there’s still a place for human experience vs merely large training sets thrown into a DNN!

Picking a winner is much harder this month. Because I don’t know the much larger system-level context from which these come, I can’t know if Willmore’s final guess is correct or not (but perhaps Don Straney can weigh in). Absent that bit of information, I found Zebonaut’s insights about the cultural biases of German PCB design to be really insightful. I can usually pick out a Japanese-made board based on stylistic decisions, but until now I hadn’t heard such a nice summary of some of the biases and preferences of German PCB designers. So, I’ll give the prize to Zebonaut for that bit of insight, along with a generally correct guess on the make and genre of the ware, which I’m unable to resolve further due to my own ignorance. Congrats, email me for your prize!