What is the worst thing you or a customer has done to a circuit? (smaller photos

[little_grey]

For obvious reasons i am not going to say who i work for, but we get some interesting damage back from customers who have ether blatently damaged something or just not cared for the product very well.
here are some pictures of recent returns with the question of 'is it repairable?'
yeeeaaa maybe, but cheaper to replace.


lets see your photos or hear your stories, do your worst!


My personal favourite, using a serial port as a ground results in a hole in the circuit board (see photo 6)

[PTR_1275]

Didn't take photos, but in my last job we had a electrical contractor order a heap of 12 volt fluro inverters, they were all returned a week later, every single one burnt and charred. Turns out the electricians wired them all up to 240v mains. No idea why they ordered 12 volt ones but they got pretty angry when we didn't give them a refund. Wasn't our problem, we supplied what they ordered, they were labeled as 12v DC, not our problem.

[little_grey]

incredible, always double check the invoice. and the part.

[Tom45]

Years ago we sold a large scanning system to a manufacturing plant in Texas. They left it outside in the weather for weeks before they were ready to install it inside.

They then found it didn't work and wanted us to repair it for free. The conversation went like this:

-- not covered by warranty since you didn't protect it from weather.

-- But we didn't know that was necessary. You should have told us.

-- In the sales contract that you signed it says to protect it from weather

-- Well, you should have told us to read the contract

[Cerebus]

Next time, do us a favour and downscale the photos before posting them. The forum only displays a photo at around 1000 pixels wide, so having originals at 5k wide (7Mb a shot instead of perhaps 150Kb) is just a waste.

Further, it's generally accepted that it's preferable to actually upload to the forum rather than to link to your own content, so if your Google/Photobucket/Whatever account goes away then the content is still there in the thread for as long as the thread is there. (cf breakage caused by Photobucket's recent change in terms and conditions.)

[chriswebb]

-- In the sales contract that you signed it says to protect it from weather

-- Well, you should have told us to read the contract

Please tell me that your company didn't give in, and told them to pound sand but that doesn't make ones customers happy.

[little_grey]

Next time, do us a favour and downscale the photos before posting them. The forum only displays a photo at around 1000 pixels wide, so having originals at 5k wide (7Mb a shot instead of perhaps 150Kb) is just a waste.

Further, it's generally accepted that it's preferable to actually upload to the forum rather than to link to your own content, so if your Google/Photobucket/Whatever account goes away then the content is still there in the thread for as long as the thread is there. (cf breakage caused by Photobucket's recent change in terms and conditions.)

notes, but re-sizing photos to fit into the forums limits is a royal pain. particularly as they are only .3mb over the limit.
i will look into doing it 'properly' however, just for you 

[glarsson]

notes, but re-sizing photos to fit into the forums limits is a royal pain.

One user resizing once or hundreds of users cursing the big images?
I started reading this thread on a phone, sitting on a bench in the forrest. The forrest and the bench was nice, but having the text bouncing around to fit the slowly loading images was not nice.

[IanMacdonald]

Guy who wired a mains plug to a microphone lead and used that to connect power.  Worse, the cable had been damaged and he'd joined it with tape.  Boss threw him out of the shop and told him never to return. When he started to protest, the biggest guy in the place was called on to perform the summary ejection. 

Oh, and the guy who linked out a blown fuse on a piece of audio gear, then when that burned out the mains transformer, he linked the primary to the secondary. Result was a big hole in the PCB, and the amplifier it was connected to had its inputs blown.

It's always a worry with this kind of nonsense going on, that there might be a fire or electrocution,and that if so the guy who last signed-off the item most likely takes the rap. Even if it was safe at that time. Thus I tend not to get involved. As an employee in the past I've had some altercations with employers over my stance on this, but hey, I'd rather have lost my job than ended up in court.

[tggzzz]

For a test set that was protected against overvoltage and reverse voltage input, open circuit and short circuit output, the technician universally known as "Bigfoot" managed to set the PCB on fire.

It was correctly detecting a marginal fault in the unit-under-test (a solenoid switch), but our hero didn't think to believe that.

He had heard that many marginal problems were caused by excessive power supply ripple. He had also heard that ripple was reduced by large capacitors, so he connected an effing big capacitor across the UUT and test box output.

You can make things foolproof, but you can't make them damnfoolproof because damn fools are so ingenious.

[bd139]

I bought a Heathkit counter from the US a number of years ago and forgot for five fatal minutes that it was a 110v device. Helpfully someone had soldered a wire across the fuse in the device and I'd stuck a 5A in the plug. Smoke came out of the sides pretty much instantly. The pass transistor on the main rail said "screw this" and shorted C-E and dumped 24v across the 5v rail leading to mass ejection of magic logic smoke. Nothing in the device wasn't toasted in some way. When I opened it you could hear some of the ICs still crying.

[Smith]

An internal user came in for a 6 amp fuse. I asked why, because users may not replace fuses themselves. He answered because the 2 amp fuses kept blowing. He tried the 4 amp fuse too, but that blew too. I got mad at him and got the device in. 2 transformers where completely toasted burned and cracked. 

[peteb2]

Back in the early 80s i was handed a medical laboratory camera for repair. The repair sheet had a comments section from the customer; "blood kept appearing a brown colour... all screws on internal panels tightened with result no picture at all"...

This was an early single tube colour-camera. Some of you may know about the multiplexing techniques on single colour video tubes back in the day where the tube's target was constructed of different sensor pixels to cover the three primary colours and a related mesh grid internally such that by timing means the correct channels were "clocked" as an output scanned raster... It produced colour pictures but they were very rudimentary.

The tubes were big, 1" format that saw it housed with, scanning and lens C type mount  in one convenient cylinder enclosure with around 7yards of thick multicore going to a Base-station/powersupply. The cylinder would couple to a microscope or with a suitable lens sit hanging above an operating table....

Lineup was a nightmare. There were 1000s of wee trim pots arrays on about 5 circuitboards some daughterboards all for adjusting scanning rates, linearity of picture shape, registration so the pictures all lay ontop of each other. Adjust any and it affected the other 999pots...

The minute i opened the Base-station i found every single trip pot (that had a screw looking head) had been turned a 100 plus times. Some had broken right off and were missing! YES... the owner had sure tightened all the screws.....

[texaspyro]

I fired a 20,000 amp pulse from my CD spot welder  into a 350 mA CREE LED... for some unfathomable reason, they don't like that.  No magic smoke release,  just total vaporization.     Oh, and a sonic boom (Noise Emitting Diode?  Dark Emitting Diode?)  Or maybe a warp in the space-time discontiuum.

[Tom45]

-- In the sales contract that you signed it says to protect it from weather

-- Well, you should have told us to read the contract

Please tell me that your company didn't give in, and told them to pound sand but that doesn't make ones customers happy.

Dealing with issues like this was for management, not techies like me. Anyway, it was over 30 years ago so I don't remember just what came of it. We had to send installation support people for the actual startup anyway, so they probably fixed it during startup.

I would hope that the customer had to pay extra for the work to repair the damage to the system.

[sasa]

Ask Louis Rossmann. He must have a lot to say on this topic.

Apart from a dead bugs...

Some 25-30 years ago, when I worked in one computer company as a young computer software engineer, one customer bring early XT or AT after some time of use  (with high end monochrome Hercules 12", if I remember correctly) , which was partially worked, whatsoever. After opening, first noted inside was a nest made of old papers, with many marks of a small rodent tooths... As there was cold winter, the mouse find a way to enter inside under small  hole in metal case under DIN input (as for some reason early cases had small hole for) and make warm comfortable nest near warm working 24h PSU...

[hs3]

The forum only displays a photo at around 1000 pixels wide, so having originals at 5k wide (7Mb a shot instead of perhaps 150Kb) is just a waste.

Not saying what the correct size is for uploading to the forum but just wanted to comment on this width "limit" that I'm seeing the photos over 3350 pixel wide in my browser and not seeing any 1000 pixel limit here. So if posted at 1000 pixel wide quite a lot of detail might not be there in that case. I have not looked closer into these specific photos and what the "appropriate" size for them would be but just wanted to comment that I'm not aware of hard size limits and it's probably up to the reader's browser window size how large the forum is showing the photos.

[Cerebus]

The forum only displays a photo at around 1000 pixels wide, so having originals at 5k wide (7Mb a shot instead of perhaps 150Kb) is just a waste.

Not saying what the correct size is for uploading to the forum but just wanted to comment on this width "limit" that I'm seeing the photos over 3350 pixel wide in my browser and not seeing any 1000 pixel limit here. So if posted at 1000 pixel wide quite a lot of detail might not be there in that case. I have not looked closer into these specific photos and what the "appropriate" size for them would be but just wanted to comment that I'm not aware of hard size limits and it's probably up to the reader's browser window size how large the forum is showing the photos.

OK, we get that you've got a nice shiny new 4K screen you want to boast about ( ), but most people will have 1920x1080 screens or thereabouts and won't maximize the window to the full screen and, as has already been pointed out, quite a few will be using phones and tablets. Anyway, that original post has six or seven inline* photos at a few meg each (the random one I picked was 7.1 meg) which is just too much for a few snapshots to make a point. It's not as if it's a microphotograph of a die. To put it into perspective, the forum limit on uploads is 2Mb total per message, 1 Mb per file, and I've never had problems with getting enough information out of photos on the forum that were restricted by those limits. I think the fact that I noticed the size because they were loading slowly on a machine with quad Xeons and 16 Gb of RAM is an indication that perhaps they were a little over the top at 5k pixels wide.

The whole point of having some limits is to avoid chewing up other people's bandwidth by being careless about what you post, or lazy about pre-processing large files to some more appropriate size. While many of us are reading from comfortably fast wired broadband, some of the forums (very international) membership are in places where connectivity isn't so great and is relatively expensive - I know for a fact that there are readers in the rural wilds of India and Pakistan - and it doesn't do any harm to show them a little consideration.

Finally, if you have a photo that *really* needs the resolution it's quite possible to display a down-sized version in the post for reference and provide a link to a full resolution version for the people who need it. Indeed, that's exactly the behaviour you get automatically if you upload the photo to the forum as an attachment.

*i.e. inline implying that there's no discretion about downloading them if you want a closer look, you get served them automatically.

[IanMacdonald]

Some 25-30 years ago, when I worked in one computer company as a young computer software engineer, one customer bring early XT or AT after some time of use  (with high end monochrome Hercules 12", if I remember correctly) , which was partially worked, whatsoever. After opening, first noted inside was a nest made of old papers, with many marks of a small rodent tooths... As there was cold winter, the mouse find a way to enter inside under small  hole in metal case under DIN input (as for some reason early cases had small hole for) and make warm comfortable nest near warm working 24h PSU...

As long as it was a serial one. No ps/2 after all. 

[IanMacdonald]

"The whole point of having some limits is to avoid chewing up other people's bandwidth by being careless about what you post, or lazy about pre-processing large files to some more appropriate size. While many of us are reading from comfortably fast wired broadband, some of the forums (very international) membership are in places where connectivity isn't so great and is relatively expensive - I know for a fact that there are readers in the rural wilds of India and Pakistan - and it doesn't do any harm to show them a little consideration."

Or the Scottish hills, for that matter. A few kbps on a 3G connection sometimes.

These days I think rather than setting a fixed page width on webpage text, it's better make it 100% and to let the user decide how wide to let the browser window be. Those with honkin' great screens won't be using the full width anyway, as you say. Setting a fixed width just restricts the viewer's choice for no good reason. (Though I know why designers do that, it's because they are from typesetting backgrounds where everything is planned to fit on a given paper size, and the idea of an indeterminate size freaks them out.)

There really needs to be some zoom or multisize capability on images though, as what's useful on a phone isn't on a big screen, or vice versa. HTML currently doesn't have any native way of doing that, other than bodges. Maybe it should.

[Electro Detective]

Didn't take photos, but in my last job we had a electrical contractor order a heap of 12 volt fluro inverters, they were all returned a week later, every single one burnt and charred. Turns out the electricians wired them all up to 240v mains. No idea why they ordered 12 volt ones but they got pretty angry when we didn't give them a refund. Wasn't our problem, we supplied what they ordered, they were labeled as 12v DC, not our problem.

That dumbass excuse for an  'electrical contractor'  that did the order should be demoted to digging cable trenches again,
alongside apprentices that would have had a better clue about 12v vs 240v   

Refund ?!!
His parents deserve a 'refund' 

[bd139]

Electricians are the worst. A friend of mine is one and he leisurely informed a couple of weeks ago that his DMM had died about 5 years ago and he hadn't bothered using it since because "stuff works or doesn't" 

[Cerebus]

Or the Scottish hills, for that matter. A few kbps on a 3G connection sometimes.

I was tempted to add a quip about our oviphillic friends in NZ or Wales who probably have similar connectivity, but I managed to resist, until you gave me a good excuse. 

I must confess to being a little disappointed that there's any mobile signal on the Scottish hills nowadays. It's entirely selfish, as I used to take to the Highlands when i wanted to make sure that nobody could reach me by any faster method than sending a Poste Restante letter. Still, it's probably for the best, as me being incommunicado in the Highlands tends to be bad for the rest of the world. The last two times I took to the hills up there I was in Easter Drumcastle (just south of Drymen) when Lady Di died, and in Glencoe on the 9th September 2001.

[bd139]

You never know but next time you go up there you might avoid the zombie apocalypse

[hs3]

OK, we get that you've got a nice shiny new 4K screen you want to boast about ( ),

Heh, ok. I admit that I was in front of a 4K resolution screen at the time I posted that but not really nice or shiny or new or even expensive one. What I was trying to say was that the original post that I commented to sounded to me like it was suggesting that the forum somehow restricted the image to around 1000 pixels wide and anything above that wouldn't be of any use to anyone.

Also if we go to the bandwidth etc. issues that I specifically didn't mention in my post I get your point about keeping file sizes to a reasonable size that makes sense in the situation. I'm used to browsing internet through wireless connections in an area where there are no decent wired options. Starting with 2G as the primary internet connection when that was the best that was available. Maybe due to that it has become a habit for me to open multiple tabs in the background and let them load before even starting to read them many times and I may not notice the loading time of larger images sometimes.