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Almost blowing it again …

Hmm not a so nice evening yesterday. Well not that bad neither, just some bad experimentation with my electronic parts. On monday I went to the shop getting a new 5V regulator (in fact i got 2 in case of burning one gain). After getting simple instruction from Iguana Labs, I was reading to turn the current IN. After about 10 seconds, some smoke was coming out the LM7805, not really from the regulator itself but in fact from the breadboard that was melting. The fucking thing was hot like hell, hopefully i managed to get a tool to get it out and not my bare fingers. So new some holes of my breadboard are melt.

So what is the fucking problem this time ? I went to my favourite IRC channel and asked Torlus (the masterchief in electronics, go visit his website, the guy is incredible). At first sight everything was ok for him, since i tought that my input might be the cause since I’m using the AC adapter from one of my SNES. Then the fatal question : “Did you put the capacitor ?” hmmm … NO …

When reading the tutorial at Iguana Labs it didn’t went to my mind that the capacitor was needed. Then i got back to the sparfun tutorials that is way more complete. Yes they also talk about the capacitors. Following also the good advice of RTFDS (Read The Fucking Data Sheet) from Torlus, I figured out that the capacitors were REALLY needed. Here is the abstract from the Data Sheet showing that.

LM7805 extract from datasheet

So at lunch time im once more going to the electronic shop to get some capacitors. I will also look for a good book explaining the basics of electronics. Electronics are way not like Software. With software you just got you software, compile it and test it. If something go wrong there is no harm done. With hardware messing up often means blowing up stuff. I need to think a bit more about that.

++ Lint

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 11:25 am and is filed under Hardware hack. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Almost blowing it again …”

  1. fr4nz Says:
    March 28th, 2008 at 11:29 am

    if i can give you a good advice, keep the phone number of the firefighters near you when you do stuff like that 😀

  2. JiëL Says:
    March 28th, 2008 at 3:21 pm

    yeah, don’t burn the bloody house down, I live nextdoors ^^