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On Sun, Feb 17, 2008 at 12:44:17PM -0500, Spehro Pefhany wrote:
> At 05:06 PM 2/16/2008, you wrote:
> >I use PICs in classes. The PICs are on a PCB, but otherwise unprotected.
> >The students buy the PCBs, so they can work at home. Informatics
> >students can not be expected to know much about static electricity, so
> >for all I know they might use it to comb their cat's hairs. I have hadd
> >some pretty weird failures previous years, so it might be a good idea to
> >put some form of protection on all PIC pins. My idea is a resistor to
> >ground for each pin, but what value? Would 1M be sufficient, or should
> >it be lower?
> >
> >And what about the one pins that probably won't like any load, even 1M:
> >the oscillator input?
> >
> >Wouter van Ooijen
> 
> The 1M resistors will have no useful effect. I suspect you will reject
> anything that I'd consider bulletproof for both cost and flexibility
> reasons.
> 
> May I suggest that a portion of an early class dedicated to proper ESD
> handling procedures could be the proper approach from a pedagogical as well
> as a business viewpoint?

Heck, is this even going to be an issue at all in an educational
setting? I mean, I know about ESD, and take some minor steps to prevent
it, like trying to touch something perhaps grounded before picking up a
bare PIC. But I've yet to ever damage a PIC chip badly enough to notice,
even after feeling shocks. I'm sure I've done more minor damage that may
crop up later but having students have to debug the occasional chip that
mysteriously fails might not be such a bad thing. :)

Can you at least socket the PICs?

- -- 
http://petertodd.org
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