14 ms·

Check if your IKEA chair is compatible with your screen

673 points by ruph123 3y ago

akarlsten 3y ago
Had the same issue a while back, had a hell of a time figuring out why one of my screens would flicker or shut off momentarily whenever my girlfriend sat down at her desk (which is next to mine). Even initially figuring out that it was the act of her sitting down that caused it took some time, with a lot of jokes about her telepathically messing with my setup in the meantime. Turns out that the gas piston in her chair (not an IKEA chair in this case) has a bit of "give" to cushion oneself when sitting down, and that compression caused some kind of electromagnetic pulse (I assume?) strong enough to mess with the monitor. I do wonder if it's perhaps bad for the monitor's lifespan, but it only affected my cheapest one, and with the cause found I can live with it.
- plastic3169 3y ago
  Wow, this is great. I have similar chair and monitor problems. Never have been able to connect the two.
- treeman79 3y ago
  There is a noise filter that you can clip onto the power line or other cables to help prevent radio transmissions from going into the line or other sources of noise. Maybe one of the cables is acting as an antenna. https://www.amazon.com/VSKEY-Anti-interference-Telephones-Equipment-Appliances/dp/B075G2P5SW https://www.amazon.com/VSKEY-Anti-interference-Telephones-Eq...
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    With 300+ cables in my setup for audio, that's not what I want to read.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      It's much less of an issue with balanced leads, so just use those?
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Everything is already balanced, that's a given.
        rubatuga 3y ago
        How about shielding and grounding
        atoav 3y ago
        Yeah but is everything balanced or are you mixing the two? And if everything is balanced is everything properly grounded? Incredible read on that topic: https://www.ranecommercial.com/kb_article.php?article=2127 https://www.ranecommercial.com/kb_article.php?article=2127
  - JerryB77 3y ago
    A friend of mine bought IEMs with a microphone (Moondrop Chuu) and it would pick up radio frequencies that you could hear through a voice call. These didn't end up fixing it, I suspected it was bad grounding but we never ended up solving what the root cause was.
  - r2_pilot 3y ago
    A similar device does not suppress the chair/monitor effect for me. Although that monitor is particularly bad (an Asus Rog, no less!).
  - The_SamminAter 3y ago
    Oh, so that’s what those are! I’ve got a few USB-mini cables (that I think came with a PS3) that have those.
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  I had exactly this issue with a chair gas piston and a large tablet display (drawing tablet), which is presumably more sensitive to EM/ES interference than ordinary screens since it's large, not battery-powered, and has both touch and stylus support.
- secretsatan 3y ago
  Most off the monitors and chairs in our office had this problem, no one could figure it out for ages
- winwhiz 3y ago
  I have this problem too! I have been trained to roll away from my desk before I stand up. I assumed it was static, and my hat's off to you who tracked this down. Steelcase Criterion / Dell S2716DG
etiam 3y ago
Remotely related, my screen makes a noise, somewhere between static and a whine, while displaying certain text files. Minimizing or closing the editor stops the noise, getting the text back on display restores the noise. I suppose it's some sort of resonance phenomenon.
- Arrath 3y ago
  I too have one screen that makes a noise, akin to coil whine, only when a certain spreadsheet is open and the window expanded past a threshold of the screen's real estate. Naturally, its the speadsheet that I use most often in my duties.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  Perhaps a silly question, but does turning it off and back on again also resolve the problem? I can occasionally hear such noises from monitors, and have always thought it was some kind of interaction with the phase of the AC power and some kind of internal physics of the monitor. Generally, turning it off and back on again fixes it for me.
  - gumby 3y ago
    In the old CRT days that could be plausible, but in these days of lcds and switching power supplies it seems less likely. But as this article describes, you never know!
    - Paul-Craft 3y ago
      Indeed, do you never know. I don't honestly think turning it off and back on would do anything, either. I also don't have one of those chairs, nor do I want to buy one and use it to test the theory. But, turning it off and back on again is a simple and easy thing to do that should be reasonably safe for the equipment. There is, after all, a reason why power cycling equipment is often a first step to diagnosing and/or fixing weird problems. :)
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > But as this article describes, you never know! When we were teenagers, my friend used to call it "waving a dead chicken". He coined this term to describe the way he would resurrect dead inkjet printers that even I gave up on - by disassembling and reassembling them until they started to work again, while being perfectly open that he has no idea how it could fix the problem, just that in practice it often did. While this was just a funny term and pretty absurd approach for fixing things (even though it worked!), I took away from it an important realization: the scope of possible causes of a weird, randomly-occuring problem is much larger than I'd normally assume. Over the years, I learned to identify some "outside context" things for computers - ESD, thermals, UV exposure, RF interference, voltage spikes in power lines, devices being almost but not quite connected. Because of that, when in a bind, "waving a dead chicken" may just be called for - in forms of e.g. percussive maintenance (hitting the thing with a wrench), moving things around, switching cables, disassembling, etc.
realo 3y ago
I have exactly the same issue with an Embody chair from Herman Miller. Not sure if it is the fabric or the piston, but definitely suspected static since I got the chair. The screen does not seem to age prematurely because of this.
- oogali 3y ago
  I have an Embody chair but no such issues with my 27" monitors.
thefz 3y ago
Had the same issue with my Secretlab. The softweave fabric makes static like crazy an when getting up the main body comes in contact with the roller base which is shaped like a star thus working as an antenna. Big ESD pulse, all Display port screens flicker. Solved by using a towel where I seat.
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
Wow, I can't believe this. I have a Markus Ikea chair and a dual screen setup with a USB c hub connecting them all. The screen likes to turn off all of the time and it drives me nuts. A good smack quickly fixes it. I never considered the chair. Mind blown with static discharge.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  > Mind blown with static discharge. You might want to look into some extra shielding for your mind. I hear having it blown by static discharge too many times can cause brain damage. ;) In all seriousness, yeah, this is crazy! IMO, IKEA should either recall and fix, modify the design of, or stop selling these chairs. ESD can seriously damage equipment, and I could easily see there being cumulative effects from something like this.
  - currency 3y ago
    I don't think it's classical high-voltage ESD reaching the monitor; it's RFI generating enough voltage to mess with the HDMI signal. Voltages generated by RFI will be relatively low compared to direct ESD.
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
  I've got the exact same problem and now I'm nearly positive (ha ha) that it's being caused by my mesh-backed AmazonBasics chair. Truly one of the most personally useful posts I've ever seen on HN.
chipper02 3y ago
Easily solved with some ESD spray: Not affiliated with Jensen, just did some googling and found a place that sells it in single cans. https://www.jensentools.com/product/160-188-1726-QT https://www.jensentools.com/product/160-188-1726-QT
- lucb1e 3y ago
  > Fast drying, anti-static coating eliminates static charge and reduces triboelectric generation from flexible surfaces. The page unfortunately doesn't explain what this is or how it works. Is it a conductive coating so that it can dissipate the electricity into something else, or does it form a shielding layer instead so that it won't zap stuff?
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    It should be slightly conductive, and you need to ground the surface somewhere, but I can't find any very specific information on this product.
  - emiliobumachar 3y ago
    Beware of toxicity of unknown conductive sprays, especially in enclosed spaces.
rahimnathwani 3y ago
I have this issue with my keyboard. My connection: WASM CODE V3 keyboard -> UGreen USB 3.0 switch -> desktop computer I don't know which device(s) are at fault but when I get off my (non-Ikea) chair[0], my keyboard sometimes stops working. It's easy to resolve by double-tapping the 'switch input' button on the USB switch, although sometimes the keyboard doesn't work until I click my mouse (or maybe vice versa). Anyway, I've gotten used to it and don't have any motivation to diagnose the issue further. [0] https://www.haworth.com/na/en/products/stools/very-0.html https://www.haworth.com/na/en/products/stools/very-0.html
junon 3y ago
Wow. Maybe this is what's been happening with my screen. When I stand up, it resets. I figured it was ESD but had no idea from what or how. I have a secretlab chair though.
- myself248 3y ago
  I also have a Secretlab but I have an ESD mat on my work surface which is grounded with a clip at the corner, and I tend to put a hand on it to stabilize myself as I stand up, which has the side effect of dissipating any charges as they're generated. I also do electronic assembly work at this desk so it's sort of a no-brainer to have the mat, I just had no idea it was also saving me from other weirdness!
- thefz 3y ago
  It's the softweave fabric, check my other comment in this thread.
blincoln 3y ago
As mentioned later in the thread, this has been documented for at least 30 years, although I'd never heard of it before: https://emcesd.com/pdf/eos93.pdf https://emcesd.com/pdf/eos93.pdf
blueflow 3y ago
I once had the problem that running make with too many parallel jobs (-j) would change my keyboard layout. The machine was some laptop mainboard glued to the backside of my monitor, and the USB socket came out at the top of the mainboard. On its way down, the USB cable for the keyboard passed across the whole mainboard. On high load, the mainboard created enough interference to cause the connection to reset, re-hotplugging my keyboard, so the previous setxkbmap call was not effective anymore and i was back to the standard US qwerty layout.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  This is the greatest thing I've read today. I love when software and the real world have entirely unexpected interactions. And by love, I usually mean hate, especially when I'm the one that has to debug them.
  - sophacles 3y ago
    These sorts of things make for good war stories. I find a trick to improve my attitude while dealing with them is to remind myself "this will be a good story at least, and I'll be glad it happened once I'm regaling others with it".
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      Oh, you know it! That's going to be a great tale to bust out for years to come.
    - dddrh 3y ago
      I call this “Type 2 Fun”. As in it’s more fun to tell the story than be experiencing it. As an example: many backpacking trip stories are type 2 fun.
  - andrewfromx 3y ago
    my favorite story on this is a town in north east usa changed it's traffic lights from energy wasting old fashion lights to new fancy low energy lights. The unexpected result: in winter time these lights did not melt the snow away and the lights were opaque with white snow.
sircastor 3y ago
Oh my goodness. I think this might be happening to me. I’ve had a semi-frequent issue where my monitor will suddenly power off and the only way I can get it to wake up is by unplugging replugging the Thunderbolt cable. Time to run some experiments
crypt1d 3y ago
Wow. I had the same issue in my previous apartment (where I was using the Marcus chair), but I could never figure it out. I just always assumed its a faulty monitor.
ciroduran 3y ago
This has very strong vibes of the PDP-10's Magic Switch https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/1232 https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/1232
- rft 3y ago
  Thank you for the link! I only knew the referenced folklore page, but never saw a picture and the following exchange. Was just about to post this story as well :)
Klaster_1 3y ago
Wow, so I wasn't crazy - exactly the same thing used to happen to me when I got up from my Markus and the screen would turn off for a second. My hypothesis was a loose cable which I bumped slightly, but not touching the table when getting up didn't work. Not sure why, but it eventually went away.
Kiro 3y ago
Anyone have a non-Mastodon link?
- lucb1e 3y ago
  What kind of link would you like?
  - zajio1am 3y ago
    Some that does not require Javascript?
    - jwilk 3y ago
      You may want to give my Mastodon CLI a try: https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon
yborg 3y ago
One of my first jobs 30+ years ago was ESD testing automotive and consumer electronics. I would spend a week with a discharge gun methodically running different discharge energies and waveforms both directly onto the devices as well as onto radiators at various distances from the device under test, as well as any cabling/harnessing that attached to the device. Then the design team would figure out the reason for any resets or operational anomalies (or damaged components) and put whatever additional suppression was needed. Sometimes this required rerouting of traces to reduce coupling or redesign of the ground plane. It's a tricky business and expensive if you want to do it right. I suspect that your average $120 display does not see this kind of testing.
- mlyle 3y ago
  Cars are a terrible ESD and EMC environment and safety critical at the same time. Computer equipment usually does pretty well, especially after installation (when there's good ground path everywhere and it's in a chassis). Between ferrite beads and TVS, there's a pretty good amount of protection, and I've seen pretty few ESD anomalies-- a reset or two when touching connectors long ago is about the extent of it. RFI and EMC is another matter. When I was operating a 100W 30MHz transmitter indoors briefly, the computers around did all kinds of wacky stuff. Flashing screens, random mouse clicks (from wired mice), transmitting packetstorms on their own, etc.
  - Eduard 3y ago
    > When I was operating a 100W 30MHz transmitter indoors ... Ehm, can it still be considered "indoors" if it's 100W at 30MHz?
  - systems_glitch 3y ago
    That was my experience with the first spark gap switched Tesla coil I built. Running it in the basement would make stuff freak out on the upper floor.
  - addled 3y ago
    As a kid, someone gave me a toy keyboard. Checking Google, it looks nearly identical to a Casio PT-1, but was probably a clone or slightly different model. 9 year-old me was delighted to discover that it would start playing on its own when it was near the plasma globe I had bought at a science museum gift shop. I couldn't explain it, but eventually came to a vague understanding. It was semi-random, mashing together short, distorted sequences from the song bank stored in memory. Being almost recognizable made it more haunting. I remember bringing this out one night during a sleepover and we all got kind of spooked. Fun times!
caaig 3y ago
It truly is ESD day https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/on_call/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/on_call/
- lucb1e 3y ago
  > Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it To give people some idea of what they're clicking
khazhoux 3y ago
Lately, I’ve become a fan of analog chairs. No Wi-Fi, no camera, no GPU. Besides the retro appeal, I actually find myself to be more creative!
- gumby 3y ago
  I prefer the “walled garden” approach where nobody can plug just any old USB unapproved device into my chair. The manufacturer does not publish a kit of approved USB devices on its website.
- halgir 3y ago
  That's just bad discipline on your part. Just because the options are there doesn't mean you have to constantly look at your chair every five minutes. My company is building a chair that doesn't compromise on features for when you need them, but elegantly hides them away when not in use so you won't be tempted every second of the day. We have room in our A round if you're interested.
  - abakker 3y ago
    but, does it have an API for chairGPT? If you don't have generative sitting by Q3 this year, you'll be missing the market.
    - halgir 3y ago
      I'm building my own Large Chair Model with stricter restraints on emergent behavior. I want no part in fueling the rise of sentient chairs.
- masswerk 3y ago
  Also, black & white chairs only (halftones, i.e. shades of grey, are ok, though)…
- m463 3y ago
  Adding those to a chair are just an excuse to download more data about your sitting and fidgeting habits to sell you more stuff.
amelius 3y ago
Are these chairs allowed in hospitals? Any heart-lung machines with IKEA chairs next to them?
vidarh 3y ago
When I was a kid we had to return my Commodore 64 for repair several times, only to be told that once they got to it, after it had been waiting at the store for a few days, there were no problems with it. Turned to be a result of storing the C64 on a bench under the "large" 26" CRT... When it was kept away from it for a while and had a chance to discharge, everything was ok. But after a while near the TV, it started "typing" gibberish of its own accord.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Either that or a ghost. Back in the eighties they’re more common. Who you’re gonna call?
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Ghostbusters was amazing on the C64. Mostly because of the few seconds of digitized speech and "karaoke style" song lyrics scroll on the title screen.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
You folks are all lucky. I have the same chair, but the ESD problem didn't manifest as screen flicker - it manifested as my work laptop bluescreening about a minute after me getting up from the chair. I wouldn't have guessed the cause of not for some random HN comment some half a year ago. The solution for now is that I don't use external screens with my laptop. One of these days I'll find a better-isolated display cable.
- samstave 3y ago
  I have several of these AOC USB external monitors and they are great: and their USB cable that comes with them has a ferrite node. https://www.amazon.com/AOC-E1659FWU-16IN-Powered-Monitor/dp/B011IFWPE4/ref=sr_1_3?crid=YN6B1Z5B7NY6&keywords=aoc+usb+monitor&qid=1682703134&s=instant-video&sprefix=aoc+usb+monitor%2Cinstant-video%2C159&sr=1-3&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.f5122f16-c3e8-4386-bf32-63e904010ad0 https://www.amazon.com/AOC-E1659FWU-16IN-Powered-Monitor/dp/...
e4e5 3y ago
I have the same problem, but don't care enough to buy a new chair. It isn't that annoying
omneity 3y ago
This reminds me of a story about sticky tapes emitting x-rays when pulled. I submitted the link here, it’s interesting in its own right: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35744187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35744187
rootusrootus 3y ago
I have another version of this problem. Almost every time I get out of my chair, my Schiit Modi DAC disappears for a moment and my music stops, then starts again a few seconds later as the DAC comes back online. I spent a fair amount of effort trying to figure that one out. Thought it was loose cables, something, but no. I don't have a Markus chair, but my Steelcase Gesture is still capable of making a pretty good amount of static electricity. Once in a while when I stand up if my boom microphone is too close I'll shock myself on it, and most of the time I have to reboot things after that. Haven't permanently killed anything yet, thankfully.
- samstave 3y ago
  I have an HP OMEN laptop, W11 and RTX and a 165hz refresh rate. When I plug the machine in, the audio will get all static-y from the built in speakers. It seems to especially happen when I am moving my mouse over a video thats playing - and the playback of videos stutters when pulling the cord in or out of the machine. Battery life on this machine sucks though... but other than that, its fantastic...
thedanbob 3y ago
I had a job in university testing breakdown voltages in various flavors of Kapton. IIRC the idea was to see how suitable they would be for spacecraft construction where they would be exposed to high voltages from solar wind. We could always tell when a test run was complete because the EM interference from >10 kV suddenly shorting to ground caused our computers to freeze. (Thankfully they still recorded the data we needed.)
paulgerhardt 3y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978004 [13 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22036652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22036652 [2 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21976814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21976814 [1 comment] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515662 [0 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22014012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22014012 [0 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35737780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35737780 [0 comments]
- spyder 3y ago
  And a superuser.com thread: https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-that-blanks-due-to-static-electricity-in-my-chair https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-that-...
Marsymars 3y ago
Whoa, I stand at my desk, so no chair, but I think I have the an issue with a similar cause. I have a cordless phone charger where plugging it in sometimes causes my screen to blink black. Since I only unplug/plug it when rearranging cabling, I've never bothered to investigate further.
green-salt 3y ago
Its annoyingly dry in my apartment usually and have had this happen with a different chair. My solution was to connect some alligator clips from a ground pin on my UPS to a metal bar under the top of my desk and hold that as I rolled my chair in to immediately bypass to ground. Didn't like zapping it through my monitor or other desk things first.
lucb1e 3y ago
An electric lighter does this to my mouse when I zap specific objects with it, such as a screwdriver. I tried distances up to about 1.5 meters away from the mouse. The only reason I initially noticed is because I saw the red light turn off that was coming faintly through the holes I drilled in the top to let a heating element that I had built in heat my hand better. (Spoiler: the holes didn't do anything, but I did notice that 5W below an exposed extremity go a long way when given 30+ minutes!) I also enjoyed the two random occasions where I shot lightning from my hands through the plastic cover of a keyboard and got the electronics into some error state, requiring it to be replugged before it would work again. It was a... power...ful feeling. This and screaming routers are some of my favorite oddities. An old cisco router that was sitting next to my desk would occasionally "scream" at me. I couldn't describe it any other way, though it was rather faint and you wouldn't hear it with music on. It took some time for ~15-year-old me to figure out that it happened with high rates of small network packets. Could be reproduced with some ping command (I would say with sudo and either a low -i or even -f, but I was a Windows user back then and forgot the relevant flags, or maybe I used hping3.)
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  You have to scream back at them: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
  - lucb1e 3y ago
    mentally calls hard drive in datacenter video - clicks - did not disappoint :) I tried this but could not reproduce it by the way.
- bentcorner 3y ago
  > It took some time for ~15-year-old me to figure out that it happened with high rates of small network packets I honestly think that there's a hidden potential with instrumenting programs with different noises, and being able to listen to them could give you a broad understanding of program behavior without needing to profile or watch logs.
quijoteuniv 3y ago
This is nothing new, I solved this and a bunch of other things by wearing a tinfoil hat.
- coolspot 3y ago
  They are still watching you.
  - quijoteuniv 3y ago
    They can watch is very boring in there… me me me me mine mine mine i me mine and so on…
kimixa 3y ago
I had an issue where one of my computer screens flickered then went black for 10 seconds or so before returning a couple of times a day seemingly randomly. I then got a headphone amp on my desk, and noticed the same thing happened every time I switched it on - it had a pretty chunky switch with a satisfying click, but I guess it also kicked out enough ESD to trigger the monitor? Armed with this theory, I replaced the bargin basement displayport cable I was using and now no longer have any screen flickering issues. I don't really know if it's better shielded or something, or I just happen to have moved things around to avoid the majority of the problem. I wonder how many things we blame on bad hardware/software are actually part of the environment - I know hyperscalers have talked about how ECC failure events are more common than "conventional wisdom", which likely means on non-ECC consumer platforms they are getting relatively regular silent memory corruption events.
sudobash1 3y ago
I have a nice little window fan that I've had for years, but last time I pulled it out it started blanking my monitor when I flip it on. I've assumed that this is some sort of ESD issue, but I don't have any great ideas on how to troubleshoot or resolve it.
tzs 3y ago
I thought that the use of differential pairs in these various systems was supposed to protect against outside interference? Looking at the pinouts for HDMI and DisplayPort I see that they both use differential pairs for all the high speed lanes that carry audio and video. For the lower speed channel for other things such as control functions DisplayPort uses a differential pair. HDMI does not. Does that make HDMI more sensitive to interference?
MikeBVaughn 3y ago
I have this exact chair and I've spent the past three months thinking the cheapo wired mouse I bought I was leaking voltage, or that I had a FUBAR HDMI cable. I cannot tell you how much of a balm this is for my sanity.
- FailMore 3y ago
  I have the same chair too! And black out screen issues!
- kudokatz 3y ago
  same here - didn't realize it was the chair! Too lazy to have tried debugging it.
  - bendingunit 3y ago
    I also have an Ikea Markus, an height adjustable table by the same brand, Lenovo Thinkpad Extreme Gen5, Lenovo Workstation Dock, and two Dell U2719D UHD Displays. I always blamed Lenovo for the displays randomly turning off and on, as the Laptop also tends to make other not so funny things when being connected to the Lenovo dockingstations, like throttling the CPU or delaying mouse and keyboard input … So glad I seem to have found the culprit reading this, at least for the display issues <3
tambourine_man 3y ago
This is one of the funniest threads in HN ever. Wasn’t expecting to laugh this much when I clicked.
makkesk8 3y ago
ESD safety is an important topic, particularly in industries where sensitive electronic components are involved. However, there are many misconceptions surrounding ESD safety, especially when it comes to the use of cardboard and cotton clothing. Cardboard, for example, is often thought of as a safe material for packaging and handling electronic components (motherboard boxes included). However, it can actually generate a significant amount of static electricity, which can damage sensitive components. Similarly, cotton clothing is often thought of as a safe material to wear in ESD-sensitive environments, but it can actually generate static electricity as well, polyester is generally considered preferred over cotton. It is a common misconception that electrostatic discharge only causes damage if you can feel it. In reality, ESD can cause damage to sensitive electronic components even if you don't feel anything. In fact, the damage caused by ESD can be more insidious when it is not noticeable. This is because when ESD is felt, individuals are more likely to take precautions to prevent it from happening again. However, when ESD is not felt, individuals may not even be aware that damage has occurred, leading to potential failures or malfunctions down the line. I would advise anyone working electronics in any capacity, it's important to keep ESD in mind, as many sporadic issues are more than likely related to electrostatic discharge in some capacity.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  > Cardboard, for example, is often thought of as a safe material for packaging and handling electronic components And that's why everything comes in anti-ESD bags
lazerl0rd 3y ago
THAT WAS MY PROBLEM?
cool-RR 3y ago
Oh hell no! I've been annoyed at my screens for about a decade! Now I understand! It's my Markus chair!
Senorsen 3y ago
Sh*, me too! Moving my chair or standing up / sitting down ("SIHOO", a chinese brand) makes my PHILIPS 278E monitor black for two seconds too!! Even not touching the table. And only when I'm using HDMI port with a HDMI 3x1 switch. If using the DP port, it seems no such issues.
simplotek 3y ago
A while ago I had one of those Ikea Flintan chairs, and after reading this post I recalled that from time to time I had a monitor+laptop flinch hard for no reason at all. I was concerned one of them was experiencing problems but other than these events they both worked flawlessly. I wonder if the chair was not the root cause.
grumbel 3y ago
There is an old EEVblog[1] video on the topic. Mine doesn't do it from chairs, but it regularly blacks out if I turn on the nearby LED strip. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-V_Z3bD_PA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-V_Z3bD_PA
- amstan 3y ago
  He documented a similar phenomenon too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weJ4JdFat8o&t=167s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weJ4JdFat8o&t=167s Your chair is fine, but your monitor is probably a potato if it can't take that interference.
mastax 3y ago
With my new carpet and habit of wearing slippers I've had a lot of trouble with ESD. Big painful zaps that would reboot my keyboard and sometimes cause other mischief. I was worried about causing permanent damage. I got in the habit of touching the grounding screw on the wall outlet while sitting down which basically fixed it. Strangely, if the computer is asleep it will wake up when I zap the ground screw. I'm still wondering how that happens. I guess it gets picked up by the wires which run to the power button? My PC case is pretty awful at EMI shielding like most modern custom PC cases.
mastax 3y ago
I've been looking for a large comfortable neoproene mousepad/desk pad which is conductive and can be grounded. I think this would help prevent damaging your computer or peripherals from ESD. I haven't been able to find anything. The electronics industry ESD mats are rubber for temperature resistance and cleaning, but not comfortable or good for mousing. I found some small cheap mousepads on AliExpress that claim health benefits from grounding but nothing large or high quality.
- Kirby64 3y ago
  Almost all components and peripherals have ESD protection built into them, designed specifically to prevent human contact causing issues. There should be no reason to be worried about damaging your peripherals (or, especially, your PC). Are you having issues with components dying randomly or something?
  - mastax 3y ago
    Before I started taking mitigation steps [0] yes. Sometimes my monitors or keyboards would shut off or get frozen and wouldn't work until I power cycled them. I broke my Ethernet port once when I blindly stuck a USB cable into the Ethernet port and gave it a big zap. I had a lot of other gremlins which I can't conclusively blame on ESD but I eliminated other possible causes. ESD protection isn't perfect and degrades every time it's used. I was giving multiple painful shocks per day. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35744965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35744965
SenHeng 3y ago
I recently bought Dell’s latest 32” monitor to connect to my 2018 Mac mini and I’ve noticed that the screen blacks out for a few seconds randomly. I did a bit of a search and there were a few mentions of static possibly being a culprit. Didn’t actually try to confirm it though and now I’ll never get the chance to because I’ve switched 1) desk placement, 2) desk, 3) Mac Studio. The problem has gone away. I don’t have a IKEA chair, currently using a Herman Miller Embody but I do (did) have an IKEA desk. A bamboo worktop, a chest on one side and those weird, A shaped legs on the other.
- m463 3y ago
  that happens to my monitor too. Sometimes it happens exactly when I click on something and I wonder how that happens.
fsckboy 3y ago
you should NOT ground your chair directly, only ground it through a large resistor, 100K or so. (you might want to check that value, it's from memory, I think you want any potential electric "shock" to be down below the 1 milliAmp range) I'd use a ground strap designed for wearing while you handle MOSFET ICs. if you ground your chair directly, it is likely to make YOU be the best circuit to ground when you handle your computer or monitor's AC "mains" (us "uk") power cords. The resistor will allow static discharge (very few coulombs at very high voltage) but limit the flow of electricity
- stephen_g 3y ago
  Very true, but the resistance should be even more - for safety it should be at least 1 megaohm.
- mgdlbp 3y ago
  Also prevents unexpected shocks to the buttocks upon sitting. Directly grounding shouldn't be particularly risky though. It's not uncommon to have a metal desk touching a grounded but not double-insulated chassis or dangling USB cable. And I get the impression that electrical systems are engineered so that users aren't touching live contacts when plugging things in - maybe less so in the case of US plugs. That said, an RCD/GFCI would help in either case, and might have in the cases of electrocution by faulty phone charger, where current presumably travelled through multiple wires in the USB cable alone.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    a grounded desk is safe-ish because your desk would be the path to ground, and if not, current entering your hand would likely exit your elbow. if your chair is the path to ground, you, via your heart, are the path to ground
- yipbub 3y ago
  So I should not sit at my desk barefoot?
ilyt 3y ago
In dry days in the office and right boots I could zap monitor to reboot it. But my keyboard was weirdest of all, just levitating electrically charged hand over it caused it to restart
thendrill 3y ago
I actually have the same issue
tinglymintyfrsh 3y ago
In the nonobvious interactions with tech department, when I was a kid, I discovered that jingling keys would change the channel on my grandparents' TV that used an ultrasonic remote.
syngrog66 3y ago
PEBKAC
DeathArrow 3y ago
A cosmic ray can flip one bit in the RAM of one of bank's computers and add 1 in front of your account's balance.
sergioisidoro 3y ago
Holly crap! My screen has been randomly flickering every now and then. Tried everything to fix it, including disabling color calibrations, unplugging things, and disabling screen dimming. I have an Ikea chair, and sometimes get significant electrostatic discharges when I get up or touch metal elements. I have a mechanical keyboard with a small piezoelectric buzzer, and sometimes I've heard it click, although it's unplugged. Everything makes sense now D:
drbawb 3y ago
I have this same issue. Not an IKEA chair, but it is a similarly cheap office chair from some big box store. It only affects my external monitors connected to my TB3 adapter. I figured out the cause pretty quick, mostly because I assumed my monitors weren't averse to the curse words that spew from my mouth after such an "ESD event."
alin23 3y ago
A lot of people told me about this “chair EMI turns off screen” after I published my “weird monitor bugs” article: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Weird%20monitor%20bugs https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Weird%20monitor%20bugs Curiously, I never had someone contact me through https://lunar.fyi/ https://lunar.fyi/ about this problem so I could not include it in the article. But it is mind boggling how many people have this problem and just now start to realize what is causing it.
goda90 3y ago
I had a pair of in-ear headphones with metal casing, that when combined with my work chair and having my shoes on, would regularly cause one of my monitors to turn off and back on if I moved wrong or stood up. Shocked myself on the headphones a few times too.
seanalltogether 3y ago
I wonder if this is with a mac laptop connected to a secondary display? Mine seems to lose the connection constantly and either restores itself shortly after or I have to disconnect the thunderbolt cable and replug back in.
geff82 3y ago
That might explain the thing I sometimes experience with my screen. I also have an Ikea Markus. Sometimes, when I get up, the screen goes off. I thought there is some kind of weird sensor in the screen.
- dexzod 3y ago
  I would consider this as a privacy feature. Ikea should mention this in their marketing material
laurensr 3y ago
The exact same thing has been bothering me for months. My screen blinking when a colleague stands up. And we ruled out loose cables or anything like that
thewebcount 3y ago
I've probably mentioned this story here, but my first job out of school was working for a nationally known cash register manufacturer, writing front-end software for the cashiers to use. This didn't happen to me but was told to me by an old-timer my first week there (mid-90s). A group had done an install at a grocery store. They did in-house testing of the new system, then rolled it out to 1 or 2 lanes to try it out for a few days before upgrading all the lanes with the new system. It was a fairly normal roll-out with a few minor issues, but nothing major. The day they rolled it out, about 2 or 3 transactions each day started including an extra charge for 10 cents worth of deli meat. This was weird because it would be pretty hard to buy only 10 cents worth of meat, and certainly any deli counter worker who had rung it up would have remembered doing so because it would have been a really bizarre order. None of them had seen such an order come through. The only thing the transactions had in common was they were paid for with a debit card. Worried about compliance issues and the possibility that there might be a bug in the new card readers, they turned off the debit card functionality. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you work in compliance), it happened again to someone paying with cash. While that was a relief because it meant the card readers were fine, it also meant they had no leads on the problem. The on-call engineer got called in to work on the problem just before the store closed one night. He checked all the obvious things - problems with the cabling; an incorrect value in the database; some data getting mangled between the cash register and the database; a problem with the scanner; etc. There were no problems he could detect. In order to keep the last few customers from entering his lane, he moved a shopping cart in front of the lane. In fact he did it to the one next to his as well because he'd be walking around the entire lane working on cabling and such. He crawled under the register to check something things just as the scanner beeped to indicate it detected an item. Sure enough it was for 10 cents worth of meat. He looked around and noticed a mother scolding her child, "Leave to empty carts alone! That lane is closed!" That's when he noticed that the cart had an ad on front of it for some random product. He jiggled the cart, and the scanner beeped again. Another 10 cents of meat. It turned out the artist who put together the ad thought that the packaging without a barcode on it looked weird, so he grabbed something he had laying around and made a fake barcode that looked similar. By some miracle, the barcode was actually valid and was ringing up 10 cents of deli meat at this store. Mystery solved!
- 3y ago
jcarrano 3y ago
The monitor at my office computer turn off whenever I connect a USB device, connect something to something connected through USB or merely connect a anything to an electrical outlet that is close to the PC.
edwintorok 3y ago
Had similar problem with my Steelcase chair: every time I'd stand up and my heels touched or came close to metalic part of the chair there was an electrostatic discharge that causes the screen to flicker on/off for a moment. My previous chair never had the problem. Solved by an anti-static floor mat from Floortex. Interestingly only one of the screens reacted this way, the one connected through displayport, HDMI seems more forgiving of electrostatic interferences like this.
rf15 3y ago
We had the same problem in our office, but it would only happen if the display was connected to a Dell docking station - the cables were fine, but certain DSes are not shielded well (or accidently play antenna with the cable, as was our initial theory)
qwertox 3y ago
I have the same issue with another brand (Topstar Open Point SY Deluxe), but it usually only happens when I wear some sandals with a specific sole. I have a power outlet glued to the desk and since it's a German version the grounding contacts are well exposed, so that, when I wear those sandals, I get up from the chair while holding the grounding contacts. It doesn't work all the time, specially when I'm also wearing a fleece jacket, because the jacket doesn't discharge over the body. But it helps a bit.
vyrotek 3y ago
That seems to explain my issue too! I have an Ikea MARKUS and my portable monitor will blink for a second sometimes when I sit down quickly.
hnbear 3y ago
Back in CRT days I was given a tiny desktop fishtank with plastic fish that swam in it. I turned it on and my screen image started gently moving around. The fish swam with magnets and having the little tank next to the screen was causing the screen image to move around.
voidfunc 3y ago
Had a similar problem in a WeWork office setup once. ESD is annoying.
YorickPeterse 3y ago
Had a similar issue with a previous standing desk: turning the motor on to adjust the height of the desk would turn on the RGBs on my keyboard (which uses a skeleton-like structure, so you can see the wires), though not always. After some trial and error I determined the motor likely produces enough interference to trigger the RGBs to turn on. I ended up just cutting the RGB cables because I didn't use them anyway, as I didn't have anything to shield the keyboard (or anything else for that matter) from the motor.
- xxs 3y ago
  Likely it was a DC motor, driven by an H bridge. Some of the induction kickback diodes are gone, if so the driving transistors may give the ghost as well.
wyred 3y ago
I have this same problem! Except that it came from my SecretLabs chair.
Xantier 3y ago
Had the same issue as well. Dry air in the apartment and flickering screen when interacting with an IKEA chair. Solved by adding a "tail" to my chair using a piece of old speaker cable. There is a metal part on the bottom of the chair that the tail can be attached to.
system2 3y ago
Why do people write articles in strange tweet forms like this? Is there a logical reason?
jmmv 3y ago
I once had an issue where my noise-cancelling headphones (but not others) would make some static/buzzing sound when connected to my computer but not to my laptop. The problem lasted for months. I don’t know how I eventually found out that the PoE adapter I had on the same socket as my computer was causing the interference. Moving it to a different socket in the same room fixed the issue.
creativenolo 3y ago
So much blaming of the chair(s) I blame the monitors.
lobocinza 3y ago
So expensive HDMI cables matter after all.
pvillano 3y ago
Error between monitor and chair
redcodenl 3y ago
I've experienced the same thing! We laughed so hard. https://twitter.com/royvanrijn/status/1214162400666103808 https://twitter.com/royvanrijn/status/1214162400666103808 It is caused by an electric EMI spike from gas lift office chair. There is even an official Dell issue about it: https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/738618-display-intermittently-blanking-flickering-or-los https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/73861...

673 points by ruph123 3y ago

Had the same issue a while back, had a hell of a time figuring out why one of my screens would flicker or shut off momentarily whenever my girlfriend sat down at her desk (which is next to mine). Even initially figuring out that it was the act of her sitting down that caused it took some time, with a lot of jokes about her telepathically messing with my setup in the meantime. Turns out that the gas piston in her chair (not an IKEA chair in this case) has a bit of "give" to cushion oneself when sitting down, and that compression caused some kind of electromagnetic pulse (I assume?) strong enough to mess with the monitor. I do wonder if it's perhaps bad for the monitor's lifespan, but it only affected my cheapest one, and with the cause found I can live with it.

plastic3169 3y ago
Wow, this is great. I have similar chair and monitor problems. Never have been able to connect the two.
treeman79 3y ago
There is a noise filter that you can clip onto the power line or other cables to help prevent radio transmissions from going into the line or other sources of noise. Maybe one of the cables is acting as an antenna. https://www.amazon.com/VSKEY-Anti-interference-Telephones-Equipment-Appliances/dp/B075G2P5SW https://www.amazon.com/VSKEY-Anti-interference-Telephones-Eq...
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  With 300+ cables in my setup for audio, that's not what I want to read.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    It's much less of an issue with balanced leads, so just use those?
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      Everything is already balanced, that's a given.
      - rubatuga 3y ago
        How about shielding and grounding
      - atoav 3y ago
        Yeah but is everything balanced or are you mixing the two? And if everything is balanced is everything properly grounded? Incredible read on that topic: https://www.ranecommercial.com/kb_article.php?article=2127 https://www.ranecommercial.com/kb_article.php?article=2127
- JerryB77 3y ago
  A friend of mine bought IEMs with a microphone (Moondrop Chuu) and it would pick up radio frequencies that you could hear through a voice call. These didn't end up fixing it, I suspected it was bad grounding but we never ended up solving what the root cause was.
- r2_pilot 3y ago
  A similar device does not suppress the chair/monitor effect for me. Although that monitor is particularly bad (an Asus Rog, no less!).
- The_SamminAter 3y ago
  Oh, so that’s what those are! I’ve got a few USB-mini cables (that I think came with a PS3) that have those.
orbital-decay 3y ago
I had exactly this issue with a chair gas piston and a large tablet display (drawing tablet), which is presumably more sensitive to EM/ES interference than ordinary screens since it's large, not battery-powered, and has both touch and stylus support.
secretsatan 3y ago
Most off the monitors and chairs in our office had this problem, no one could figure it out for ages
winwhiz 3y ago
I have this problem too! I have been trained to roll away from my desk before I stand up. I assumed it was static, and my hat's off to you who tracked this down. Steelcase Criterion / Dell S2716DG

etiam 3y ago

Remotely related, my screen makes a noise, somewhere between static and a whine, while displaying certain text files. Minimizing or closing the editor stops the noise, getting the text back on display restores the noise. I suppose it's some sort of resonance phenomenon.

Arrath 3y ago
I too have one screen that makes a noise, akin to coil whine, only when a certain spreadsheet is open and the window expanded past a threshold of the screen's real estate. Naturally, its the speadsheet that I use most often in my duties.
Paul-Craft 3y ago
Perhaps a silly question, but does turning it off and back on again also resolve the problem? I can occasionally hear such noises from monitors, and have always thought it was some kind of interaction with the phase of the AC power and some kind of internal physics of the monitor. Generally, turning it off and back on again fixes it for me.
- gumby 3y ago
  In the old CRT days that could be plausible, but in these days of lcds and switching power supplies it seems less likely. But as this article describes, you never know!
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    Indeed, do you never know. I don't honestly think turning it off and back on would do anything, either. I also don't have one of those chairs, nor do I want to buy one and use it to test the theory. But, turning it off and back on again is a simple and easy thing to do that should be reasonably safe for the equipment. There is, after all, a reason why power cycling equipment is often a first step to diagnosing and/or fixing weird problems. :)
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > But as this article describes, you never know! When we were teenagers, my friend used to call it "waving a dead chicken". He coined this term to describe the way he would resurrect dead inkjet printers that even I gave up on - by disassembling and reassembling them until they started to work again, while being perfectly open that he has no idea how it could fix the problem, just that in practice it often did. While this was just a funny term and pretty absurd approach for fixing things (even though it worked!), I took away from it an important realization: the scope of possible causes of a weird, randomly-occuring problem is much larger than I'd normally assume. Over the years, I learned to identify some "outside context" things for computers - ESD, thermals, UV exposure, RF interference, voltage spikes in power lines, devices being almost but not quite connected. Because of that, when in a bind, "waving a dead chicken" may just be called for - in forms of e.g. percussive maintenance (hitting the thing with a wrench), moving things around, switching cables, disassembling, etc.

realo 3y ago

I have exactly the same issue with an Embody chair from Herman Miller. Not sure if it is the fabric or the piston, but definitely suspected static since I got the chair. The screen does not seem to age prematurely because of this.

oogali 3y ago
I have an Embody chair but no such issues with my 27" monitors.

thefz 3y ago

Had the same issue with my Secretlab. The softweave fabric makes static like crazy an when getting up the main body comes in contact with the roller base which is shaped like a star thus working as an antenna. Big ESD pulse, all Display port screens flicker. Solved by using a towel where I seat.

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

Wow, I can't believe this. I have a Markus Ikea chair and a dual screen setup with a USB c hub connecting them all. The screen likes to turn off all of the time and it drives me nuts. A good smack quickly fixes it. I never considered the chair. Mind blown with static discharge.

Paul-Craft 3y ago
> Mind blown with static discharge. You might want to look into some extra shielding for your mind. I hear having it blown by static discharge too many times can cause brain damage. ;) In all seriousness, yeah, this is crazy! IMO, IKEA should either recall and fix, modify the design of, or stop selling these chairs. ESD can seriously damage equipment, and I could easily see there being cumulative effects from something like this.
- currency 3y ago
  I don't think it's classical high-voltage ESD reaching the monitor; it's RFI generating enough voltage to mess with the HDMI signal. Voltages generated by RFI will be relatively low compared to direct ESD.
mustacheemperor 3y ago
I've got the exact same problem and now I'm nearly positive (ha ha) that it's being caused by my mesh-backed AmazonBasics chair. Truly one of the most personally useful posts I've ever seen on HN.

chipper02 3y ago

Easily solved with some ESD spray: Not affiliated with Jensen, just did some googling and found a place that sells it in single cans. https://www.jensentools.com/product/160-188-1726-QT https://www.jensentools.com/product/160-188-1726-QT

lucb1e 3y ago
> Fast drying, anti-static coating eliminates static charge and reduces triboelectric generation from flexible surfaces. The page unfortunately doesn't explain what this is or how it works. Is it a conductive coating so that it can dissipate the electricity into something else, or does it form a shielding layer instead so that it won't zap stuff?
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  It should be slightly conductive, and you need to ground the surface somewhere, but I can't find any very specific information on this product.
- emiliobumachar 3y ago
  Beware of toxicity of unknown conductive sprays, especially in enclosed spaces.

rahimnathwani 3y ago

I have this issue with my keyboard. My connection: WASM CODE V3 keyboard -> UGreen USB 3.0 switch -> desktop computer I don't know which device(s) are at fault but when I get off my (non-Ikea) chair[0], my keyboard sometimes stops working. It's easy to resolve by double-tapping the 'switch input' button on the USB switch, although sometimes the keyboard doesn't work until I click my mouse (or maybe vice versa). Anyway, I've gotten used to it and don't have any motivation to diagnose the issue further. [0] https://www.haworth.com/na/en/products/stools/very-0.html https://www.haworth.com/na/en/products/stools/very-0.html

junon 3y ago

Wow. Maybe this is what's been happening with my screen. When I stand up, it resets. I figured it was ESD but had no idea from what or how. I have a secretlab chair though.

myself248 3y ago
I also have a Secretlab but I have an ESD mat on my work surface which is grounded with a clip at the corner, and I tend to put a hand on it to stabilize myself as I stand up, which has the side effect of dissipating any charges as they're generated. I also do electronic assembly work at this desk so it's sort of a no-brainer to have the mat, I just had no idea it was also saving me from other weirdness!
thefz 3y ago
It's the softweave fabric, check my other comment in this thread.

blincoln 3y ago

As mentioned later in the thread, this has been documented for at least 30 years, although I'd never heard of it before: https://emcesd.com/pdf/eos93.pdf https://emcesd.com/pdf/eos93.pdf

blueflow 3y ago

I once had the problem that running make with too many parallel jobs (-j) would change my keyboard layout. The machine was some laptop mainboard glued to the backside of my monitor, and the USB socket came out at the top of the mainboard. On its way down, the USB cable for the keyboard passed across the whole mainboard. On high load, the mainboard created enough interference to cause the connection to reset, re-hotplugging my keyboard, so the previous setxkbmap call was not effective anymore and i was back to the standard US qwerty layout.

kstrauser 3y ago
This is the greatest thing I've read today. I love when software and the real world have entirely unexpected interactions. And by love, I usually mean hate, especially when I'm the one that has to debug them.
- sophacles 3y ago
  These sorts of things make for good war stories. I find a trick to improve my attitude while dealing with them is to remind myself "this will be a good story at least, and I'll be glad it happened once I'm regaling others with it".
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    Oh, you know it! That's going to be a great tale to bust out for years to come.
  - dddrh 3y ago
    I call this “Type 2 Fun”. As in it’s more fun to tell the story than be experiencing it. As an example: many backpacking trip stories are type 2 fun.
- andrewfromx 3y ago
  my favorite story on this is a town in north east usa changed it's traffic lights from energy wasting old fashion lights to new fancy low energy lights. The unexpected result: in winter time these lights did not melt the snow away and the lights were opaque with white snow.

sircastor 3y ago

Oh my goodness. I think this might be happening to me. I’ve had a semi-frequent issue where my monitor will suddenly power off and the only way I can get it to wake up is by unplugging replugging the Thunderbolt cable. Time to run some experiments

crypt1d 3y ago

Wow. I had the same issue in my previous apartment (where I was using the Marcus chair), but I could never figure it out. I just always assumed its a faulty monitor.

ciroduran 3y ago

This has very strong vibes of the PDP-10's Magic Switch https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/1232 https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/1232

rft 3y ago
Thank you for the link! I only knew the referenced folklore page, but never saw a picture and the following exchange. Was just about to post this story as well :)

Klaster_1 3y ago

Wow, so I wasn't crazy - exactly the same thing used to happen to me when I got up from my Markus and the screen would turn off for a second. My hypothesis was a loose cable which I bumped slightly, but not touching the table when getting up didn't work. Not sure why, but it eventually went away.

Kiro 3y ago

Anyone have a non-Mastodon link?

lucb1e 3y ago
What kind of link would you like?
- zajio1am 3y ago
  Some that does not require Javascript?
  - jwilk 3y ago
    You may want to give my Mastodon CLI a try: https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon

yborg 3y ago

One of my first jobs 30+ years ago was ESD testing automotive and consumer electronics. I would spend a week with a discharge gun methodically running different discharge energies and waveforms both directly onto the devices as well as onto radiators at various distances from the device under test, as well as any cabling/harnessing that attached to the device. Then the design team would figure out the reason for any resets or operational anomalies (or damaged components) and put whatever additional suppression was needed. Sometimes this required rerouting of traces to reduce coupling or redesign of the ground plane. It's a tricky business and expensive if you want to do it right. I suspect that your average $120 display does not see this kind of testing.

mlyle 3y ago
Cars are a terrible ESD and EMC environment and safety critical at the same time. Computer equipment usually does pretty well, especially after installation (when there's good ground path everywhere and it's in a chassis). Between ferrite beads and TVS, there's a pretty good amount of protection, and I've seen pretty few ESD anomalies-- a reset or two when touching connectors long ago is about the extent of it. RFI and EMC is another matter. When I was operating a 100W 30MHz transmitter indoors briefly, the computers around did all kinds of wacky stuff. Flashing screens, random mouse clicks (from wired mice), transmitting packetstorms on their own, etc.
- Eduard 3y ago
  > When I was operating a 100W 30MHz transmitter indoors ... Ehm, can it still be considered "indoors" if it's 100W at 30MHz?
- systems_glitch 3y ago
  That was my experience with the first spark gap switched Tesla coil I built. Running it in the basement would make stuff freak out on the upper floor.
- addled 3y ago
  As a kid, someone gave me a toy keyboard. Checking Google, it looks nearly identical to a Casio PT-1, but was probably a clone or slightly different model. 9 year-old me was delighted to discover that it would start playing on its own when it was near the plasma globe I had bought at a science museum gift shop. I couldn't explain it, but eventually came to a vague understanding. It was semi-random, mashing together short, distorted sequences from the song bank stored in memory. Being almost recognizable made it more haunting. I remember bringing this out one night during a sleepover and we all got kind of spooked. Fun times!

caaig 3y ago

It truly is ESD day https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/on_call/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/on_call/

lucb1e 3y ago
> Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it To give people some idea of what they're clicking

khazhoux 3y ago

Lately, I’ve become a fan of analog chairs. No Wi-Fi, no camera, no GPU. Besides the retro appeal, I actually find myself to be more creative!

gumby 3y ago
I prefer the “walled garden” approach where nobody can plug just any old USB unapproved device into my chair. The manufacturer does not publish a kit of approved USB devices on its website.
halgir 3y ago
That's just bad discipline on your part. Just because the options are there doesn't mean you have to constantly look at your chair every five minutes. My company is building a chair that doesn't compromise on features for when you need them, but elegantly hides them away when not in use so you won't be tempted every second of the day. We have room in our A round if you're interested.
- abakker 3y ago
  but, does it have an API for chairGPT? If you don't have generative sitting by Q3 this year, you'll be missing the market.
  - halgir 3y ago
    I'm building my own Large Chair Model with stricter restraints on emergent behavior. I want no part in fueling the rise of sentient chairs.
masswerk 3y ago
Also, black & white chairs only (halftones, i.e. shades of grey, are ok, though)…
m463 3y ago
Adding those to a chair are just an excuse to download more data about your sitting and fidgeting habits to sell you more stuff.

amelius 3y ago

Are these chairs allowed in hospitals? Any heart-lung machines with IKEA chairs next to them?

vidarh 3y ago

When I was a kid we had to return my Commodore 64 for repair several times, only to be told that once they got to it, after it had been waiting at the store for a few days, there were no problems with it. Turned to be a result of storing the C64 on a bench under the "large" 26" CRT... When it was kept away from it for a while and had a chance to discharge, everything was ok. But after a while near the TV, it started "typing" gibberish of its own accord.

tambourine_man 3y ago
Either that or a ghost. Back in the eighties they’re more common. Who you’re gonna call?
- vidarh 3y ago
  Ghostbusters was amazing on the C64. Mostly because of the few seconds of digitized speech and "karaoke style" song lyrics scroll on the title screen.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

You folks are all lucky. I have the same chair, but the ESD problem didn't manifest as screen flicker - it manifested as my work laptop bluescreening about a minute after me getting up from the chair. I wouldn't have guessed the cause of not for some random HN comment some half a year ago. The solution for now is that I don't use external screens with my laptop. One of these days I'll find a better-isolated display cable.

samstave 3y ago
I have several of these AOC USB external monitors and they are great: and their USB cable that comes with them has a ferrite node. https://www.amazon.com/AOC-E1659FWU-16IN-Powered-Monitor/dp/B011IFWPE4/ref=sr_1_3?crid=YN6B1Z5B7NY6&keywords=aoc+usb+monitor&qid=1682703134&s=instant-video&sprefix=aoc+usb+monitor%2Cinstant-video%2C159&sr=1-3&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.f5122f16-c3e8-4386-bf32-63e904010ad0 https://www.amazon.com/AOC-E1659FWU-16IN-Powered-Monitor/dp/...

e4e5 3y ago

I have the same problem, but don't care enough to buy a new chair. It isn't that annoying

omneity 3y ago

This reminds me of a story about sticky tapes emitting x-rays when pulled. I submitted the link here, it’s interesting in its own right: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35744187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35744187

rootusrootus 3y ago

I have another version of this problem. Almost every time I get out of my chair, my Schiit Modi DAC disappears for a moment and my music stops, then starts again a few seconds later as the DAC comes back online. I spent a fair amount of effort trying to figure that one out. Thought it was loose cables, something, but no. I don't have a Markus chair, but my Steelcase Gesture is still capable of making a pretty good amount of static electricity. Once in a while when I stand up if my boom microphone is too close I'll shock myself on it, and most of the time I have to reboot things after that. Haven't permanently killed anything yet, thankfully.

samstave 3y ago
I have an HP OMEN laptop, W11 and RTX and a 165hz refresh rate. When I plug the machine in, the audio will get all static-y from the built in speakers. It seems to especially happen when I am moving my mouse over a video thats playing - and the playback of videos stutters when pulling the cord in or out of the machine. Battery life on this machine sucks though... but other than that, its fantastic...

thedanbob 3y ago

I had a job in university testing breakdown voltages in various flavors of Kapton. IIRC the idea was to see how suitable they would be for spacecraft construction where they would be exposed to high voltages from solar wind. We could always tell when a test run was complete because the EM interference from >10 kV suddenly shorting to ground caused our computers to freeze. (Thankfully they still recorded the data we needed.)

paulgerhardt 3y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978004 [13 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22036652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22036652 [2 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21976814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21976814 [1 comment] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515662 [0 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22014012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22014012 [0 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35737780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35737780 [0 comments]

spyder 3y ago
And a superuser.com thread: https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-that-blanks-due-to-static-electricity-in-my-chair https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-that-...

Marsymars 3y ago

Whoa, I stand at my desk, so no chair, but I think I have the an issue with a similar cause. I have a cordless phone charger where plugging it in sometimes causes my screen to blink black. Since I only unplug/plug it when rearranging cabling, I've never bothered to investigate further.

green-salt 3y ago

Its annoyingly dry in my apartment usually and have had this happen with a different chair. My solution was to connect some alligator clips from a ground pin on my UPS to a metal bar under the top of my desk and hold that as I rolled my chair in to immediately bypass to ground. Didn't like zapping it through my monitor or other desk things first.

lucb1e 3y ago

An electric lighter does this to my mouse when I zap specific objects with it, such as a screwdriver. I tried distances up to about 1.5 meters away from the mouse. The only reason I initially noticed is because I saw the red light turn off that was coming faintly through the holes I drilled in the top to let a heating element that I had built in heat my hand better. (Spoiler: the holes didn't do anything, but I did notice that 5W below an exposed extremity go a long way when given 30+ minutes!) I also enjoyed the two random occasions where I shot lightning from my hands through the plastic cover of a keyboard and got the electronics into some error state, requiring it to be replugged before it would work again. It was a... power...ful feeling. This and screaming routers are some of my favorite oddities. An old cisco router that was sitting next to my desk would occasionally "scream" at me. I couldn't describe it any other way, though it was rather faint and you wouldn't hear it with music on. It took some time for ~15-year-old me to figure out that it happened with high rates of small network packets. Could be reproduced with some ping command (I would say with sudo and either a low -i or even -f, but I was a Windows user back then and forgot the relevant flags, or maybe I used hping3.)

tambourine_man 3y ago
You have to scream back at them: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
- lucb1e 3y ago
  mentally calls hard drive in datacenter video - clicks - did not disappoint :) I tried this but could not reproduce it by the way.
bentcorner 3y ago
> It took some time for ~15-year-old me to figure out that it happened with high rates of small network packets I honestly think that there's a hidden potential with instrumenting programs with different noises, and being able to listen to them could give you a broad understanding of program behavior without needing to profile or watch logs.

quijoteuniv 3y ago

This is nothing new, I solved this and a bunch of other things by wearing a tinfoil hat.

coolspot 3y ago
They are still watching you.
- quijoteuniv 3y ago
  They can watch is very boring in there… me me me me mine mine mine i me mine and so on…

kimixa 3y ago

I had an issue where one of my computer screens flickered then went black for 10 seconds or so before returning a couple of times a day seemingly randomly. I then got a headphone amp on my desk, and noticed the same thing happened every time I switched it on - it had a pretty chunky switch with a satisfying click, but I guess it also kicked out enough ESD to trigger the monitor? Armed with this theory, I replaced the bargin basement displayport cable I was using and now no longer have any screen flickering issues. I don't really know if it's better shielded or something, or I just happen to have moved things around to avoid the majority of the problem. I wonder how many things we blame on bad hardware/software are actually part of the environment - I know hyperscalers have talked about how ECC failure events are more common than "conventional wisdom", which likely means on non-ECC consumer platforms they are getting relatively regular silent memory corruption events.

sudobash1 3y ago

I have a nice little window fan that I've had for years, but last time I pulled it out it started blanking my monitor when I flip it on. I've assumed that this is some sort of ESD issue, but I don't have any great ideas on how to troubleshoot or resolve it.

tzs 3y ago

I thought that the use of differential pairs in these various systems was supposed to protect against outside interference? Looking at the pinouts for HDMI and DisplayPort I see that they both use differential pairs for all the high speed lanes that carry audio and video. For the lower speed channel for other things such as control functions DisplayPort uses a differential pair. HDMI does not. Does that make HDMI more sensitive to interference?

MikeBVaughn 3y ago

I have this exact chair and I've spent the past three months thinking the cheapo wired mouse I bought I was leaking voltage, or that I had a FUBAR HDMI cable. I cannot tell you how much of a balm this is for my sanity.

FailMore 3y ago
I have the same chair too! And black out screen issues!
kudokatz 3y ago
same here - didn't realize it was the chair! Too lazy to have tried debugging it.
- bendingunit 3y ago
  I also have an Ikea Markus, an height adjustable table by the same brand, Lenovo Thinkpad Extreme Gen5, Lenovo Workstation Dock, and two Dell U2719D UHD Displays. I always blamed Lenovo for the displays randomly turning off and on, as the Laptop also tends to make other not so funny things when being connected to the Lenovo dockingstations, like throttling the CPU or delaying mouse and keyboard input … So glad I seem to have found the culprit reading this, at least for the display issues <3

tambourine_man 3y ago

This is one of the funniest threads in HN ever. Wasn’t expecting to laugh this much when I clicked.

makkesk8 3y ago

ESD safety is an important topic, particularly in industries where sensitive electronic components are involved. However, there are many misconceptions surrounding ESD safety, especially when it comes to the use of cardboard and cotton clothing. Cardboard, for example, is often thought of as a safe material for packaging and handling electronic components (motherboard boxes included). However, it can actually generate a significant amount of static electricity, which can damage sensitive components. Similarly, cotton clothing is often thought of as a safe material to wear in ESD-sensitive environments, but it can actually generate static electricity as well, polyester is generally considered preferred over cotton. It is a common misconception that electrostatic discharge only causes damage if you can feel it. In reality, ESD can cause damage to sensitive electronic components even if you don't feel anything. In fact, the damage caused by ESD can be more insidious when it is not noticeable. This is because when ESD is felt, individuals are more likely to take precautions to prevent it from happening again. However, when ESD is not felt, individuals may not even be aware that damage has occurred, leading to potential failures or malfunctions down the line. I would advise anyone working electronics in any capacity, it's important to keep ESD in mind, as many sporadic issues are more than likely related to electrostatic discharge in some capacity.

raverbashing 3y ago
> Cardboard, for example, is often thought of as a safe material for packaging and handling electronic components And that's why everything comes in anti-ESD bags

lazerl0rd 3y ago

THAT WAS MY PROBLEM?

cool-RR 3y ago

Oh hell no! I've been annoyed at my screens for about a decade! Now I understand! It's my Markus chair!

Senorsen 3y ago

Sh*, me too! Moving my chair or standing up / sitting down ("SIHOO", a chinese brand) makes my PHILIPS 278E monitor black for two seconds too!! Even not touching the table. And only when I'm using HDMI port with a HDMI 3x1 switch. If using the DP port, it seems no such issues.

simplotek 3y ago

A while ago I had one of those Ikea Flintan chairs, and after reading this post I recalled that from time to time I had a monitor+laptop flinch hard for no reason at all. I was concerned one of them was experiencing problems but other than these events they both worked flawlessly. I wonder if the chair was not the root cause.

grumbel 3y ago

There is an old EEVblog[1] video on the topic. Mine doesn't do it from chairs, but it regularly blacks out if I turn on the nearby LED strip. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-V_Z3bD_PA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-V_Z3bD_PA

amstan 3y ago
He documented a similar phenomenon too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weJ4JdFat8o&t=167s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weJ4JdFat8o&t=167s Your chair is fine, but your monitor is probably a potato if it can't take that interference.

mastax 3y ago

With my new carpet and habit of wearing slippers I've had a lot of trouble with ESD. Big painful zaps that would reboot my keyboard and sometimes cause other mischief. I was worried about causing permanent damage. I got in the habit of touching the grounding screw on the wall outlet while sitting down which basically fixed it. Strangely, if the computer is asleep it will wake up when I zap the ground screw. I'm still wondering how that happens. I guess it gets picked up by the wires which run to the power button? My PC case is pretty awful at EMI shielding like most modern custom PC cases.

mastax 3y ago

I've been looking for a large comfortable neoproene mousepad/desk pad which is conductive and can be grounded. I think this would help prevent damaging your computer or peripherals from ESD. I haven't been able to find anything. The electronics industry ESD mats are rubber for temperature resistance and cleaning, but not comfortable or good for mousing. I found some small cheap mousepads on AliExpress that claim health benefits from grounding but nothing large or high quality.

Kirby64 3y ago
Almost all components and peripherals have ESD protection built into them, designed specifically to prevent human contact causing issues. There should be no reason to be worried about damaging your peripherals (or, especially, your PC). Are you having issues with components dying randomly or something?
- mastax 3y ago
  Before I started taking mitigation steps [0] yes. Sometimes my monitors or keyboards would shut off or get frozen and wouldn't work until I power cycled them. I broke my Ethernet port once when I blindly stuck a USB cable into the Ethernet port and gave it a big zap. I had a lot of other gremlins which I can't conclusively blame on ESD but I eliminated other possible causes. ESD protection isn't perfect and degrades every time it's used. I was giving multiple painful shocks per day. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35744965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35744965

SenHeng 3y ago

I recently bought Dell’s latest 32” monitor to connect to my 2018 Mac mini and I’ve noticed that the screen blacks out for a few seconds randomly. I did a bit of a search and there were a few mentions of static possibly being a culprit. Didn’t actually try to confirm it though and now I’ll never get the chance to because I’ve switched 1) desk placement, 2) desk, 3) Mac Studio. The problem has gone away. I don’t have a IKEA chair, currently using a Herman Miller Embody but I do (did) have an IKEA desk. A bamboo worktop, a chest on one side and those weird, A shaped legs on the other.

m463 3y ago
that happens to my monitor too. Sometimes it happens exactly when I click on something and I wonder how that happens.

fsckboy 3y ago

you should NOT ground your chair directly, only ground it through a large resistor, 100K or so. (you might want to check that value, it's from memory, I think you want any potential electric "shock" to be down below the 1 milliAmp range) I'd use a ground strap designed for wearing while you handle MOSFET ICs. if you ground your chair directly, it is likely to make YOU be the best circuit to ground when you handle your computer or monitor's AC "mains" (us "uk") power cords. The resistor will allow static discharge (very few coulombs at very high voltage) but limit the flow of electricity

stephen_g 3y ago
Very true, but the resistance should be even more - for safety it should be at least 1 megaohm.
mgdlbp 3y ago
Also prevents unexpected shocks to the buttocks upon sitting. Directly grounding shouldn't be particularly risky though. It's not uncommon to have a metal desk touching a grounded but not double-insulated chassis or dangling USB cable. And I get the impression that electrical systems are engineered so that users aren't touching live contacts when plugging things in - maybe less so in the case of US plugs. That said, an RCD/GFCI would help in either case, and might have in the cases of electrocution by faulty phone charger, where current presumably travelled through multiple wires in the USB cable alone.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  a grounded desk is safe-ish because your desk would be the path to ground, and if not, current entering your hand would likely exit your elbow. if your chair is the path to ground, you, via your heart, are the path to ground
yipbub 3y ago
So I should not sit at my desk barefoot?

ilyt 3y ago

In dry days in the office and right boots I could zap monitor to reboot it. But my keyboard was weirdest of all, just levitating electrically charged hand over it caused it to restart

thendrill 3y ago

I actually have the same issue

tinglymintyfrsh 3y ago

In the nonobvious interactions with tech department, when I was a kid, I discovered that jingling keys would change the channel on my grandparents' TV that used an ultrasonic remote.

syngrog66 3y ago

PEBKAC

DeathArrow 3y ago

A cosmic ray can flip one bit in the RAM of one of bank's computers and add 1 in front of your account's balance.

sergioisidoro 3y ago

Holly crap! My screen has been randomly flickering every now and then. Tried everything to fix it, including disabling color calibrations, unplugging things, and disabling screen dimming. I have an Ikea chair, and sometimes get significant electrostatic discharges when I get up or touch metal elements. I have a mechanical keyboard with a small piezoelectric buzzer, and sometimes I've heard it click, although it's unplugged. Everything makes sense now D:

drbawb 3y ago

I have this same issue. Not an IKEA chair, but it is a similarly cheap office chair from some big box store. It only affects my external monitors connected to my TB3 adapter. I figured out the cause pretty quick, mostly because I assumed my monitors weren't averse to the curse words that spew from my mouth after such an "ESD event."

alin23 3y ago

A lot of people told me about this “chair EMI turns off screen” after I published my “weird monitor bugs” article: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Weird%20monitor%20bugs https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Weird%20monitor%20bugs Curiously, I never had someone contact me through https://lunar.fyi/ https://lunar.fyi/ about this problem so I could not include it in the article. But it is mind boggling how many people have this problem and just now start to realize what is causing it.

goda90 3y ago

I had a pair of in-ear headphones with metal casing, that when combined with my work chair and having my shoes on, would regularly cause one of my monitors to turn off and back on if I moved wrong or stood up. Shocked myself on the headphones a few times too.

seanalltogether 3y ago

I wonder if this is with a mac laptop connected to a secondary display? Mine seems to lose the connection constantly and either restores itself shortly after or I have to disconnect the thunderbolt cable and replug back in.

geff82 3y ago

That might explain the thing I sometimes experience with my screen. I also have an Ikea Markus. Sometimes, when I get up, the screen goes off. I thought there is some kind of weird sensor in the screen.

dexzod 3y ago
I would consider this as a privacy feature. Ikea should mention this in their marketing material

laurensr 3y ago

The exact same thing has been bothering me for months. My screen blinking when a colleague stands up. And we ruled out loose cables or anything like that

thewebcount 3y ago

I've probably mentioned this story here, but my first job out of school was working for a nationally known cash register manufacturer, writing front-end software for the cashiers to use. This didn't happen to me but was told to me by an old-timer my first week there (mid-90s). A group had done an install at a grocery store. They did in-house testing of the new system, then rolled it out to 1 or 2 lanes to try it out for a few days before upgrading all the lanes with the new system. It was a fairly normal roll-out with a few minor issues, but nothing major. The day they rolled it out, about 2 or 3 transactions each day started including an extra charge for 10 cents worth of deli meat. This was weird because it would be pretty hard to buy only 10 cents worth of meat, and certainly any deli counter worker who had rung it up would have remembered doing so because it would have been a really bizarre order. None of them had seen such an order come through. The only thing the transactions had in common was they were paid for with a debit card. Worried about compliance issues and the possibility that there might be a bug in the new card readers, they turned off the debit card functionality. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you work in compliance), it happened again to someone paying with cash. While that was a relief because it meant the card readers were fine, it also meant they had no leads on the problem. The on-call engineer got called in to work on the problem just before the store closed one night. He checked all the obvious things - problems with the cabling; an incorrect value in the database; some data getting mangled between the cash register and the database; a problem with the scanner; etc. There were no problems he could detect. In order to keep the last few customers from entering his lane, he moved a shopping cart in front of the lane. In fact he did it to the one next to his as well because he'd be walking around the entire lane working on cabling and such. He crawled under the register to check something things just as the scanner beeped to indicate it detected an item. Sure enough it was for 10 cents worth of meat. He looked around and noticed a mother scolding her child, "Leave to empty carts alone! That lane is closed!" That's when he noticed that the cart had an ad on front of it for some random product. He jiggled the cart, and the scanner beeped again. Another 10 cents of meat. It turned out the artist who put together the ad thought that the packaging without a barcode on it looked weird, so he grabbed something he had laying around and made a fake barcode that looked similar. By some miracle, the barcode was actually valid and was ringing up 10 cents of deli meat at this store. Mystery solved!

3y ago

jcarrano 3y ago

The monitor at my office computer turn off whenever I connect a USB device, connect something to something connected through USB or merely connect a anything to an electrical outlet that is close to the PC.

edwintorok 3y ago

Had similar problem with my Steelcase chair: every time I'd stand up and my heels touched or came close to metalic part of the chair there was an electrostatic discharge that causes the screen to flicker on/off for a moment. My previous chair never had the problem. Solved by an anti-static floor mat from Floortex. Interestingly only one of the screens reacted this way, the one connected through displayport, HDMI seems more forgiving of electrostatic interferences like this.

rf15 3y ago

We had the same problem in our office, but it would only happen if the display was connected to a Dell docking station - the cables were fine, but certain DSes are not shielded well (or accidently play antenna with the cable, as was our initial theory)

qwertox 3y ago

I have the same issue with another brand (Topstar Open Point SY Deluxe), but it usually only happens when I wear some sandals with a specific sole. I have a power outlet glued to the desk and since it's a German version the grounding contacts are well exposed, so that, when I wear those sandals, I get up from the chair while holding the grounding contacts. It doesn't work all the time, specially when I'm also wearing a fleece jacket, because the jacket doesn't discharge over the body. But it helps a bit.

vyrotek 3y ago

That seems to explain my issue too! I have an Ikea MARKUS and my portable monitor will blink for a second sometimes when I sit down quickly.

hnbear 3y ago

Back in CRT days I was given a tiny desktop fishtank with plastic fish that swam in it. I turned it on and my screen image started gently moving around. The fish swam with magnets and having the little tank next to the screen was causing the screen image to move around.

voidfunc 3y ago

Had a similar problem in a WeWork office setup once. ESD is annoying.

YorickPeterse 3y ago

Had a similar issue with a previous standing desk: turning the motor on to adjust the height of the desk would turn on the RGBs on my keyboard (which uses a skeleton-like structure, so you can see the wires), though not always. After some trial and error I determined the motor likely produces enough interference to trigger the RGBs to turn on. I ended up just cutting the RGB cables because I didn't use them anyway, as I didn't have anything to shield the keyboard (or anything else for that matter) from the motor.

xxs 3y ago
Likely it was a DC motor, driven by an H bridge. Some of the induction kickback diodes are gone, if so the driving transistors may give the ghost as well.

wyred 3y ago

I have this same problem! Except that it came from my SecretLabs chair.

Xantier 3y ago

Had the same issue as well. Dry air in the apartment and flickering screen when interacting with an IKEA chair. Solved by adding a "tail" to my chair using a piece of old speaker cable. There is a metal part on the bottom of the chair that the tail can be attached to.

system2 3y ago

Why do people write articles in strange tweet forms like this? Is there a logical reason?

jmmv 3y ago

I once had an issue where my noise-cancelling headphones (but not others) would make some static/buzzing sound when connected to my computer but not to my laptop. The problem lasted for months. I don’t know how I eventually found out that the PoE adapter I had on the same socket as my computer was causing the interference. Moving it to a different socket in the same room fixed the issue.

creativenolo 3y ago

So much blaming of the chair(s) I blame the monitors.

lobocinza 3y ago

So expensive HDMI cables matter after all.

pvillano 3y ago

Error between monitor and chair

redcodenl 3y ago

I've experienced the same thing! We laughed so hard. https://twitter.com/royvanrijn/status/1214162400666103808 https://twitter.com/royvanrijn/status/1214162400666103808 It is caused by an electric EMI spike from gas lift office chair. There is even an official Dell issue about it: https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/738618-display-intermittently-blanking-flickering-or-los https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/73861...