Well, that was unfortunate…

• Published in japan-life
• Date 2025-04-10
• 1 min read

Let out magic smoke while testing some PCBs today. It was purely incidental - a wire from the testing harness slipped from my fingers and swung out right onto a grounded clip, shorting the transistor to the ground. It's not that big of a deal, and the transistor can be replaced, although not easily as the PCB has to be re-coated afterward. Still, this is going to give some people some ammo against me. Also, they probably will ask me to write the usual report for the incident, along with a suggestion for how to prevent the same incident from happening again. I wonder what should I suggest. To use proper connectors instead of testing harnesses. Or not to skip on current limiting resistors in your designs.