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Warning: static discharge took out my whole bench last Thursday
Was working on a power supply board in my garage shop near Detroit. Touched a cap that I thought was drained and it zapped through my wrist strap to the scope. Fried the front end of my Rigol, cost me $220 for repair. Been using a dedicated grounding mat ever since. Anyone else had a bench tool get killed by a stray charge?
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gray65mo ago
Huh, that sucks about your Rigol. Just a heads up though, static discharge through a wrist strap is actually pretty rare if the strap is hooked up right to a good earth ground. It usually bleeds off slow and harmless. Might have been a bad connection at the mat or the discharge hit a different path first. Glad the mat is working now though.
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milaprice5mo ago
Only bit of static my mat ever caught was my cat walking across it, not a single electron from my wrist. Guess Rigol just really wanted to test your grounding theory firsthand.
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the_jason5mo ago
Yeah but I dunno man, I've killed a few components over the years with static and it always happened when I thought I was being careful. The whole "slow bleed" thing might be true in a perfect lab but my workbench is never that clean or organized. I've had a wrist strap pop off without me noticing and just dangle there, giving me a false sense of safety. Also if your mat is on a painted floor or a laminate desk instead of a real grounded surface, that slow bleed can turn into a quick zap through whatever path has the least resistance, like right through your Rigol's front end. I'm not saying you're wrong about the physics, I'm saying reality is messier than the theory.
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