What is the most unusual experience you have had with electronics?
computer guy
Posts: 1,113
I am interested to hear the weird and wacky things you guys have experienced when working with electronics.
This might include something happening that you weren't expecting (good or bad).
Or something you learnt that surprised you.
Mine is when I was about 12 and I connected a 5mm red LED up to a 9V battery and the plastic casing of the LED exploded and bits of LED went flying across the room at high speed.
I expected it to light for a bit and burn out, but the results where impressive.
This might include something happening that you weren't expecting (good or bad).
Or something you learnt that surprised you.
Mine is when I was about 12 and I connected a 5mm red LED up to a 9V battery and the plastic casing of the LED exploded and bits of LED went flying across the room at high speed.
I expected it to light for a bit and burn out, but the results where impressive.
Comments
In 1984 I was working in a US NAVY repair facility in Misawa Japan. My friend liked to pick up boards to test that came from the soldering specialty folks at the start of the day. The previous night someone set an order to have a large electrolytic capacitor replaced in a power supply. My friend started the test procedure and bam! The cap went off like a rocket and hit his horn-rimed standard issue glasses. I'm sure the glasses which were only scratched saved his eye.
-Phil
But when I saw on the Web, a hot dog plugged into 120VAC with about 20 LEDs of various colors blinking on and off due to eddy currents in the cooking hot dog -- that was IT.
http://meat-recipes.wonderhowto.com/how-to/cook-hot-dog-with-leds-154557/
-Phil
-Tor
-Phil
LOL!
If all goes well we'll have another Propeller chip for our infatuation. Otherwise, we may be forced into buying existing excess inventory somewhere else.
I've experimented with different ways of blowing up electrolytic capacitors. It's possible to plug them into 120VAC, and they go pop. I make sure to use an extension chord.
Back in my inexperienced days (joke!), I tried teaching soldering to some students. Unfortunately, I forgot that I was much better and my tests might not be accurate. I was able to solder the device with no problems: an LED soldered directly to a coin cell lithium battery. The first time I tried it with somebody inexperienced, it exploded and he ran around the room screaming. He was 20 years old, too. Fortunately, nobody was hurt and I don't teach that anymore (now we solder wires: much safer!).
Yeah, vacuum tubes.
I had a pile of parts salvaged from similar TV's and easily found a candidate to replace the bad cap, which was also easy to identify because it was scorched. Of course my cap had come from another old TV, and I wasn't too up on what happens to caps as they age back then... I put it in, turned the set around, turned it on, and high-fived my girl as a nice sharp crisp picture emerged.
Which held for about 30 seconds.
At 90 seconds the new capacitor exploded, spraying little bits of capacitor electrolyte soaked paper all over the living room and rocketing the capacitor can right through the wood veneer cabinet.
I probably could have fixed it but I couldn't afford to order a new capacitor of the right type, and I had to put the set back out on my own curb, where someone else plucked it before the garbage men arrived.
I am really shocked!!!! Are you saying that you can get a glowing pickle by plugging it in to 110VAC?
Recently I find it spooky that you can get the digits of a 7 segment LCD, as used in calculators etc, to go dark just by grounding one pin and touching a few others whilst holding a power chord in the other hand.
Our lab had a battery backup system. Think dozens of car batteries (actually deep cycle batteries) connected by fat cables to copper conductors something like 2 x 30 cm several meters long.
A service tech slipped and touched his wrench to both panels where it welded itself. Another tech in the room swore he saw the shadow of the guy's hand through the copper in the flash that burned it off. Probably not, he probably just knew what was happening and his brain filled in the gory details, but it still scares me from touching big fat copper conductors connected to dozens of deep cycle batteries.
The one that really caught my attention was a DIY X-ray machine made of an old vacumn tube being abused by an excess of applied voltage. It seems that the X-rays would stream off the top of it and one could then use photographic paper or film in a light excluding sealed envelope to take pictures of dead fish, one's hand, and so on.
Of course, there were serious hazards of accumulating radiation burns. But in the 1960s, hobbyist were braver and didn't have lawyers willing to sue publishers so easily.
When my father saw what we were doing he almost went into a panic, and pulled out the dishwasher to fix whatever frayed wires were touching the frame.
But we kids thought it was pretty cool.
Anyway we were having 'fun' vaporizing just about anything we could find. At some point I managed to get the hot end of it and the next thing me and my buddy remember is picking ourselves up off the ground. From what we can determine, I (electrically induced) backhanded him so hard that it knocked both of us on to the floor from our "bar stool" style bench chairs.
Another time I had designed a circuit that I called a universal power supply....The current was regulated, and the voltage automatically adjusted to whatever you needed to plug it into without needing to move a slider switch or any of that business... I was rather proud of the design and it worked well for a long time until .... one day I was using it and it sounded like two rifle shots going off in close proximity, One hit my cheek and left a nasty bruise. Turns out the the capacitors rated for 16V had had enough and decided to blow. They were no bigger than my pinkie finger around. ... So much for that design (Sigh)
Beau remains my role model
Turned out to be the chip inside an UV erasable EPROM shining at me through it's quartz window.
I had plugged that EPROM in backwards and it was glowing red (for a while).