Do I sense a theme? Welcome to the tour of the various little gadgets I have littered around my desk for test & measurement!
This one is likely to be guessed pretty quickly as well, but a shout-out to Ole for introducing me to this little gem. It’s pretty impressive the amount of features & diagnostics packed into this tiny package. It’s not the cheapest tool, but a good tool – and I have to say I strongly agree with many of the product designer’s technical and aesthetic choices. The build quality is definitely up there.
I especially appreciate products that don’t default to crappy Philips drive screws – this is probably a battle that I will ultimately lose, but a hill I plan to die on: the world needs to move on and use a better drive type already. Unfortunately, without specific prompting, AIs tend to default to rendering slotted or Philips drive screws…
The Ware for January 2026 is a FNIRSI DPS-150. Tim nailed it almost immediately; congrats, email me for your prize! The DPS-150 is a small, portable DC “benchtop” power supply that converts USB-C into a range of voltages and currents. samchin convinced me to get one of these as an impulse buy in the Shenzhen markets last month. I’ll have to say that overall I’m happy with it, but the UI has been challenging for me to wrap my head around. Definitely keep the user manual for this one – I’m still referring to it to figure out all the modes.
The main technical issue I’ve had with it is that the overcurrent protection trips when powering loads that have steep changes in current draw – for example, I can’t boot a Raspberry Pi 4 off of this supply, as it thinks the point at which the CPU goes into full frequency is an overcurrent event, and shuts down as a protection response. However, it’s perfect for simulating a small battery – the current graph over time is definitely handy feedback during embedded development – and it’s the “right amount of small”.
There’s an even smaller DC supply that I own (Sinilink XY3605 – I thought I name that wared it but apparently I didn’t) but it’s so small I have to carry around a remote control to program it, which is inconvenient enough that in practice I reach for this one instead, even though it’s slightly larger. Still, when I’m at my desk, nothing beats my Envox EEZ Bench Box 3. Love that thing!
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.
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.
