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Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4062
Hi all. Well thats a good reason to wear safety goggles. I was testing a driver circuit based around five CCFL boards in parallel (via diodes).
Turned it on (several fried transistors later) and it seemed to be working, so i went along the boards with a fluorescent tube to check that they all worked. Got to *4 and BANG! as one of the transistors exploded in my face...
Luckily no damage thanks to the goggles, but you wouldn't think that a simple fluorescent tube driver could do this.
Registered Member #63
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:18AM
Location:
Posts: 1425
Interesting experience -- I only started wearing goggles as a result of a transistor explosion. I purchased some "ST" MOSFETs on the cheap. It turned out they were chinese counterFETs and not ST.
I found that the front of these FETs blasted spectacularly on a regular basis. Why? Because the black epoxy package had gas-filled voids.
Having seen the hunk of black package miss my eye by what must have been less than two inches, I now wear goggles if the electronics aren't going to have a shroud over them. And I'm more careful about copping counterFETs.
Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4062
Hmm. Interestingly, this problem has also been seen in the repair industry, as a result of fake components (even power resistors and fuses!!!!)
I just found out that the 5V1 zener on this hard disk had gone dead short and cracked its case- maybe related? this is the second Seagate x00GB drive with this failure mode.
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Exploding transistors..
