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what's your recent fail?

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nicknails:
Connected power backwards and damaged 6 IC's  :palm:

YurkshireLad:
I recently got new glasses, I also now need reading glasses. Of course, I decided not to use the new reading glasses and accidentally connected the ground pin of an AHT10 to 5V input. No magic smoke, but poof! Luckily a minor mistake to a minor component. I'm being more careful and I'm using my reading glasses now too!  :palm:

Melt-O-Tronic:
I had been injecting power into a circuit with DMM probes connected to my 66309D power supply.  I had another set of probes plugged into a DMM.  A few hours later, working on a completely separate circuit, I picked up the wrong probes to check for the presence of mains voltage.   :palm:

God was merciful.  It only blew a small fuse on the 66309D's motherboard and I had spares.  Ugh.  This is how I learn bad practices.

mindcrime:
My most recent "D'oh, fail!" moment was a few weeks ago. I was playing around with one of those 4-pin crystal oscillators on a breadboard, and getting a reading of a very weak 60hz signal on the scope, even though the part was supposed to be something like 24mhz or something. It didn't take long to figure out that the oscillator wasn't outputting anything, and that what I was seeing on the scope was just line-noise from the 60hz mains in the room. But why wasn't the oscillator oscillating? :scared: :wtf:

Well... it turns out that sometimes when you are looking at a part bottom-side down on the bread-board, and simultaneously looking at the datasheet on a PC screen that's a couple of feet away, and you're not really paying attention to how the part in the diagram is oriented, you can get crossed up on which pins are which. I had wired the thing up like it was upside-down basically. D'oh.  |O  :palm:

Flipped all the connections around and got my signal as expected.   :-+

David Hess:
I powered up one of my old legacy PCs to copy the BIOS off for someone.  It had been partially disassembled while I decided whether to refurbish it and without the fan noise, I did not realize that I left it on.  By the next day, overheating had apparently damaged it because it no longer starts the POST.

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