Lawrence,

I got in a hurry and put a C77A/JW part into a project socket backwards
once.  The bond wires lit up like a lightbulb.  I was thinking, "that's
strange, it's not supposed to do that" for the couple of seconds it took
me to gather my wits and turn off the supply.  Not having a lot of
spares at the time, I marked the bottom of the part "flashlight" turned
it around and put in in the socket correctly.  Unfortunately, it worked
fine.  Unfortunate because the fried port pins failed slowly over the
next week or so.  I spent considerable time troubleshooting my "faulty"
code until it finally dawned on me to check to see if the chip I was
working on was the one I had "flashlighted".  It was - code was fine -
"flashlight" hit the garbage can immediately.

Regards,
Dave

Lawrence Lile wrote:
>
> Well, I've fried 'em, reversed the power supply polarity on 'em, powered
> things that overtaxed the port, and had PIC's come through, but this one
> takes the cake.    I've got a PIC here that lost a bus fight, port RB2 tried
> to go low when it was connected to 5V through a solder bridge.  The rest of
> the PIC went merrily about it's way, but port RB2 was transmogrified into a
> permanent 14 ohm resistor.    I could hook the circuit up to my 5V power
> supply, where it drew some 350 mA, but the rest of the PIC chugged along,
> lighting it's LEDs and firing it's relays like nothing was wrong.  As soon
> as I put the circuit in my application, the board's power supply (which was
> designed to provide a few milliamps) wimped out, and nothing would happen.
> A PIC can work just fine after one of it's port pins commits kamakaze.
>
> Devilishly hard to troubleshoot though.  "It works fine over here on the
> bench, but as soon as I install it in a unit it croaks --?&%$#!!!"

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