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What’s the worst mistake/problem you’ve made during a project, and what did you learn from it? We are asking e14 in our Join, Share & Win Competition

E14Alice

Hello Everyone!

Hope you are all doing well. I’m excited to announce that this month's AskE14 question is: What is the worst mistake or problem you've encountered during a project, and what did you learn from it?

Sharing your experiences can help others identify similar challenges and understand how to overcome them. I hope this discussion will be beneficial for those who are just starting out on a project or feeling stuck with a problem.

Here's the question:

What’s the worst mistake/problem you’ve made during a project, and what did you learn from it? 

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Competition Details

You'll have to be a member of the element14 Community to join in and take part in this “Join, Share & Win” challenge. It's simple, all you have to do is:

1. You need to make sure you are Register  or Login
2. Then answer the following question by adding a reply or commenting!

What’s the worst mistake/problem you’ve made during a project, and what did you learn from it?  

The Community team will then select the best 3 answers to win a Raspberry Pi 400!

This month, we are giving away:

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Learn more

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  • About 15 years ago we got a couple of FPGA development boards.  I don't remember the exact cost anymore but suffice it to say each board was in the $1500 price range.  I powered the first board using an old Lambda power supply.  This supply was so old it didn't have a digital display so we used to use a DMM to set voltage.  When I powered the dev board up I noticed that the voltage wasn't quite 3.3V.  Figuring that it was cable loss I carefully adjusted the voltage to no avail.  Then I powered cycled the board.  When power returned  current went up and down wildly.  Turns out cable loss was not the problem.  The supply was going into current limit and that 'careful' voltage  adjustment I made earlier now allowed 4.5V to be applied to the dev board.  Needless to say that board was toast.

    Now for the second board, we managed to have a few productive weeks reading back detected RF envelopes by means of a log amp connected to an ADC.  At some point we realized we weren't getting the full dynamic range of the log amp so we decided to filter the supply.  In this latest adventure I connected a large inductor between the Lambda and the dev board.  Some of the 2005 era FPGAs were notorious for drawing a ridiculous amount of in-rush current on start up... and since I was using a big inductor there must have been a giant voltage spike on start up.  Long story short, this board was dead too.

    These boards had cost a pretty penny and losing them back to back was very impactful and it took quite a while to get my confidence back.  Needless to say I've never made the same errors again... and to this day, for better or worse, I still carry an aversion to LC filters.

  • in reply to dang74

    1500 $Fearful, in india you can get a full Ai pc at that cost, Almost a new workbench max upgrade

  • in reply to Aniket_kumar_raj

    This was back when FPGAs with 25,000 Logic elements were quite expensive.  They've come down in price since then.

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