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Electrical Accidents


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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 3 months later...

I found this this afternoon. I think he is a Canadian version of SuzelleDIY. He was born in Iran.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI5Ftm1-jik.

 

Man... I was lucky to learn of the ground probe on the scope on a circuit where I didn't blow anything up (12V 3 amp setup, there was only a bit of a spark).

 

But ever since I've realised just how careful you have to be. Example, yesterday I had the scope on my little STM32 development board. Which is plugged into the laptop via USB. So... should I put the ground probe of the scope on the negative of the devel board? That is wired to the negative of the USB port. Who knows where that goes... so on my little Gigabit netbook that is no problem, doesn't have or need an earth pin. But on the Dell, it has an earth pin, and believe it or not, it seems that's actually connected to the laptop. It seems the negative on the USB port is actually grounded to earth (which is fortunate, imagine if it wasn't)...

 

So now every time I want to measure something, I have to go through that whole process :-)

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Man... I was lucky to learn of the ground probe on the scope on a circuit where I didn't blow anything up (12V 3 amp setup, there was only a bit of a spark).

 

But ever since I've realised just how careful you have to be. Example, yesterday I had the scope on my little STM32 development board. Which is plugged into the laptop via USB. So... should I put the ground probe of the scope on the negative of the devel board? That is wired to the negative of the USB port. Who knows where that goes... so on my little Gigabit netbook that is no problem, doesn't have or need an earth pin. But on the Dell, it has an earth pin, and believe it or not, it seems that's actually connected to the laptop. It seems the negative on the USB port is actually grounded to earth (which is fortunate, imagine if it wasn't)...

 

So now every time I want to measure something, I have to go through that whole process :-)

 

Get an isolation transformer for the mains side of your scope and disconnect the earth. :)

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Get an isolation transformer for the mains side of your scope and disconnect the earth. :)

Yup :-) The  other idea I've had: Get a small 12V inverter, run it from the car battery. Thing is, this darn scope chows a 100W of power, so that's probably not the best idea. I must look into this isolation transformer idea again, at least find out what it costs, maybe it's not as bad as I instinctively expect it to be.

 

Scope only cost R1000... so I sort of don't want to spend that much on protecting it :-)

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...

This came up in facebook feed.

Some notes. They have protective gear on, the guy actually stands to the side when he pulls the lever, and by the end when they chuck snow into it the power was apparently already off (because my thought at first was that this is extremely stupid, throwing frozen WATER onto electricity :-) ).

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  • 8 months later...

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