Nathan E Norman wrote:
On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 12:57:44AM -0800, Vineet Kumar wrote:* Pigeon <jah.pigeon@ukonline.co.uk> [20030327 21:15 PST]:On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 02:23:22PM +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote:On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Pigeon wrote:If you leave it for a few hours after disconnecting the power, you should be safe. The power supply should have resistors to discharge the capacitors when they're switched off.It SHOULD have, but often does not. If it does, less than a minute is all you need. If it doesn't, a few days might not be enough. So check it with a voltmeter.Misparsed as "check it with a volunteer". Might be a problem if you're at home or in a small company where a missing luser might be noticed...In electronics labs etc, if someone suddenly says "Catch!" and lobs something at you, don't catch it. It's probably a capacitor with a nice hefty charge in it.Pigeon, dude ... you've got to find some less hostile friends! ;-)Actually, I think that many people in electronics labs are just this way. They're very friendly people otherwise :-) Full disclosure; my dad taught me this trick when I told him we were going to do some experiments at school.
When I was a kid, about the time when my father was first teaching me aboutelectronics, I charged up an electrolytic capacitor using a hand-cranked 'Megger' (Megohm-meter) and managed to zap myself with it. I must have fallen to the
floor from the shock; I have no idea how long I was out - all I remember is picking myself up from the floor. A decade or so later I was designing offline switching power supplies.After my father died, I inherited his electronic/electrical gear, but strangely there were no Meggers among the stuff he left behind. I wonder what happened to them. The nicest thing he ever said to me was "you have that engineering nouse"; this was after he'd outlined a problem he was having and I'd described a simple
solution for him. He's been dead ten years now. Know of any Electronic CAD systems that run on GNU/Linux, preferably Debian? Regards, Ross.