My brother is an avid motorcyclist. He claims there are two types of bikers in the world: those who have dropped a bike, and those who will drop a bike.
Similarly, I claim there are two types of electronics people in the world: those who have made a unit of measure error, and those who will. I just joined the former group: I've been scratching my head about why a particular DC-DC switching voltage regulator was behaving strangely for a few days. I went over every part, built several copies, etc. I even swapped a bunch of components to values that should be way out of range, and killed a lot of parts in the process.
I was just looking over the datasheet for the IC in question when I realized that the timing capacitor is supposed to be 2.2 nanofarads. The cap I have been using is 2.2 microfarads.
Please, laugh at my expense - I deserve it. Then, share your own story!
I've dropped a bike or two in my time, the little 125s and 200s are of little consequence other than broken indicators and stuff, its the big beggers that take 2 of you to get it back on its wheels, highly humiliating........
Soldering up something wrong, realising you've screwed up, spending 10 minutes with a solder sucker pulling it in bits and then... soldering it back up again the same wrong way. :
I've already posted a thread about this, but I wish to add it to this list...
I once spent a week trying to figure out why code was not being uploaded to my arduino. Bought another one, and even tried uploading from 2 different pc's. Issue turned out to be I was pressing the wrong button in the IDE (check code rather than execute) because the check code button is the execute button in processing (the "play" button), and I was learning processing at the time.
