General > General Technical Chat
Spider in PC and related topics
msuffidy:
Today I noticed some cob webs in a pc. I am thinking if spiders were on PCBs they would not be good conductors and mostly not do anything. In the old days when computers were all 5-12V TTL, I am guessing splashing a few volts around would not matter. If signal levels are around 2V, maybe this can be an issue? I don't know if there are really sensitive places, like tuners?
In general though I thought people were not conductors, but things became conductors with higher voltages. Is this accurate?
TimFox:
There is a large safety literature about electrocution. From my days in MRI, the basic thing I learned about electricity and the human body is that the interior is basically saline (inside a cellular structure) that is fairly low resistance compared with the resistance through the skin, but the skin resistance is a strong function of skin moisture. Back in high school, we played lie detector using only a Simpson 260 in its highest resistance setting, safely measuring the resistance between hands (pinching the probes between thumb and forefinger), to see if lying made the skin sweat.
KaneTW:
I find it hard to imagine a spider will cause a failure -- it'd have to both touch exposed metal and also touch a part where the resulting current is large enough to cause a significant shift in voltage.
As for conductivity, skin is a decent isolator, both due to oils on skin and other factors. Wet or sweaty skin is weakly conductive, and your innards are quite conductive. High voltages will find it easier to basically cause dielectric breakdown (not sure if it's actually dielectric breakdown, but close enough).
Syntax Error:
Tell your kids it's where the Google web spider lives... in time for halloween.
newbrain:
--- Quote from: KaneTW on October 11, 2020, 07:30:03 pm ---I find it hard to imagine a spider will cause a failure.
--- End quote ---
Have you ever heard of bugs in computers?
Not a spider, though.
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