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 middle layer of the three-layer stack is probably hollowed out, such that the surrounding boards create a Faraday cage. This would allow sensitive ECG front-end circuitry to be placed inside a shielded “container” that also doubles as a connector between the front and back boards.

This one was a real stumper, and it was interesting to see the discussion. I had redacted the DSP’s part number – ADSP-CM403 – because with that, an LLM could identify the board with a query such as “what boards have both an adsp-cm403 and an ice40 fpga”. That’s apparently a pretty unique part combination. When I saw it for the first time, I also couldn’t guess the ware; I kept on looking at the huge connector and assuming that some high-bandwidth, high-speed signals were involved. That’s an awful lot of pins for the advertised functions, but probably an insane amount of grounding/shielding is going on to isolate the sensitive ECG input lines.

I was betting the boards near-exclusive use of Analog Devices parts would be a tip-off that this was an Analog Devices module of some type, which would significantly narrow the space of possible functions. You kind of have to be on a very particular mission and/or have an unlimited budget to end up integrating that level of ADI parts on a board if you’re not actually ADI. To that end, megabytephreak got dangerously close to guessing it, so I’ll declare megabytephreak as the winner. Congrats, email me for your prize!

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