Homebrew PCBs

I am running production lines and supervising two engineering labs and the
ESD problems exist.  What you and others fail to take into account is the
environment.

If someone is in South Florida without air-conditioning= high humidity, tile
floors, and walking barefoot, there is never going to be a problem.  Then
someone up north in the winter with low humidity, carpeted floors, and
rubber soled shoes, there will be lots of problems.

 

Hobbyists need to be realistic and practical without overdoing it in either
direction.

Bertho

 

From: Stefan Trethan   Sent: Saturday, December 24, 2011 03:49



What's wrong with staying realistic about risk?

We could do all sorts of things safer - say reduce traffic deaths to
almost zero by driving no faster than 20mph, and yet we do not do it.
Here no lifes are at risk - just $1 components, why let yourself be
slowed down with ESD measures?

Having used only minimal ESD precautions all my life and never seen a
failure, and frequently testing designs with ESD guns gives me some
confidence that there is a certain amount of unwarranted hype
associated with this topic.

Would you care to elaborate using specific examples of how you damaged
components with ESD?
For some reason peope never can back their fear up with specific
incidents when I prompt them. The examples should _not_ involve either
a huge production quantity (where the statistics get you), or very
early CMOS components (which were much more sensitive).

This is similar to the temperature when soldering issue. There are old
books and stuff that suggest clamping heatsink tweezers onto
semiconductors while soldering, and generally put the fear of god into
beginners. When they ask for advise I have to first disabuse them of
the notion that components will just blow up as soon as they get
slightly warm. Modern components can withstand soldering heat to an
amazing degree.

It is not helpful to overrate risk, it just puts people off when they
really should be getting stuck into some hands on experience. I let
the magic smoke out so many times with stupid mistakes, why worry
about one or two components that may or may not have been damaged by
ESD?

ST

On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 9:11 AM, Boman33 <boman33@...
<mailto:boman33%40vinland.com> > wrote:
> You might be lucky but do not spread bad info.
>
> Bertho
>
>
>
> From:  Stefan Trethan   Sent: Saturday, December 24, 2011 02:28
>
>
>
> Come on people, stay realistic.
> Steve is most likely not going to make assemblies for an aircraft or
> anything like that.
> Nor is he going to run thousands of boards a day from his homemade PCB
> holder.
>
> In a typical home shop or even development lab setting you'll not
> notice the effects of ESD measures - there just aren't any failures
> even if you take no measures at all.
> ---<snip





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