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Great advice, and clear writing style. Story time! During my 2nd year of university, I built a small CPU as a project. It was split across 2 breadboards, using
by peterburkimsher 9y ago
Great advice, and clear writing style.
Story time! During my 2nd year of university, I built a small CPU as a project. It was split across 2 breadboards, using an FPGA for the control unit.
It worked fine during debugging, but sometimes it would give really weird problems. Then when we tried to debug again, it was fixed. What was going on?
We'd forgotten to connect a common GND between the breadboards. When we attached the probes to debug it, the ground was passed via the USB port on the PC.
- jacquesm 9y agoIn low power circuits forgotten ground is annoying but that's about it. In power circuits it can cause spectacular and expensive side effects.
- msds 9y agoAnd with RF, well, things get really weird really fast...
- jacquesm 9y agoWith added lottery for spontaneous creation of miniature microwave ovens, depending on the power levels.
- williamscales 9y agoIn my undergraduate I worked in a lab where we made very sensitive voltage measurements on a large apparatus. The experiment was grounded to a large copper bar buried under the floor but the measurement equipment was connected to the building ground thereby creating a gigantic loop that could pick up all kinds of crazy noise. The solution was to break the (literal) ground loop with a buffer amplifier.