What was your biggest project Disaster? We are asking e14 in our Join, Share & Win Competition

I wouldn't call it a disaster per-se, but I was testing a few cheap switching converter modules from China. One of them was perhaps too enthusiastically rated, resulting in a nice small fire erupting from the corner of my room at 4am ...

But at least, now I know the 94V-0 claim was probably correct as the fire self-extinguished before I managed to slam the emergency shutdown remotely over Wi-Fi. By the time I got out of bed, all I was greeted with was a charred capacitor-that-once-was.

That day, I learned that while the preferable amount of fire is zero, a small amount of fire is okay, at least for a short time. I've recently tested some more and managed some magic smoke too, but with much less alarm and surprise. Small doses build tolerance ... but I haven't gone back to test a second sample of that particular product as yet ...

- Gough

The biggest project disaster of my career, a failure of due diligence, happened while volunteering with Engineers Without Borders, and it all came down to a shocking failure to do our planning homework. We were excited to plan a solar irrigation system for grain fields in Morocco and secured a significant Spanish government cooperation grant to fund it. We relied on a partner introduced by a previously vetted Moroccan NGO.

The project imploded when our engineer went for the site survey. He quickly discovered the partner was not planting grain but illegally cultivating marijuana. The entire project was a front to secure our funds and technology for their operation. We immediately canceled the project. The real disaster for me was the administrative fallout: I spent over a year working through the endless bureaucracy to successfully return the grant money to the Spanish government.

We were too young, too eager, and trusted a secondhand partner without doing enough independent verification. A tough, expensive lesson, but one that drastically changed how our association now evaluates partners.

Too funny.  Had you guys went another route and went along with things... well that would have made an excellent book... and movie as well.

A few years back we had a field experiment in Utah at Dugway Proving grounds.  We set up some 20m towers and the critters kept chewing up the data logger cables, so some of the students chose to bury the data loggers in the sand to keep the critters out.  Of course it rained the next day and flooded the electronics - $9000 up in smoke.

Here is a little story of woe. Way back I designed an instrumentation package for a river survey boat that monitored the cable length fed out from a winch. The display used Beckman Panaplex displays. (high voltage neon). The control box was weatherproof - operating on the deck (IP65). One day a year later the customer brought the instrumentation back saying it didn't work anymore. I took it apart and the inside had all kinds of rust, corrosion and crud. Somehow water had got inside, but that didn't explain the mess. I cleaned it up as much as possible and started troubleshooting the circuitry. It turned out that the only thing actually fried was the high voltage DC-DC converters. I refurbished the system and when we returned it, the customer admitted the boat had sunk. Someone left the petcock open over a long weekend. You can imagine the repercussions. The instrument must have filled with water and when the boat was recovered it sat around for weeks as the water slowly boiled off in the sun. I was totally amazed at how much corroded crud was inside - every type of metal part was totally covered in oxide "barnacles", including the solder, even though the exterior looked fine. I was also amazed that only the DC converters actually died. The morale of the story - if it is going on a boat maybe IP65 is not good enough, think IP68. That particular problem with that particular boat was never repeated ..... (that I know of)

Wow, its amazing how resilient electronics can be.

That reminds me of some of the findings of those racing on the salt flats. They have found traces of salt inside fully welded up tubular frames and it corrodes them from the inside out. Looks solid from the outside but you can poke a screwdriver through it.

Remember the old saying "No good deed goes unpunished!"

Well said.

Ouch!