I seem to have wiped two picaxe 18X chips in the last two weeks - my circuits are fine, they work, but occasionally when I do SOMETHING (I have only wiped them twice, and so I don't know what it is that I'm doing...) they get wiped - no bang, no smoke, no smell, no heat, just nothing.
So - how easy is it to wipe a picaxe 18x? I seem to be doing it with horrifying regularity - are they really that fragile?
E.
what do you mean by wiped?
what do you mean by wiped? like killing them? if so, are you pulling or pusing too much current/voltage through them? what exactly is the setup that you’re using…?
no more bootstrap program…
The event is something like this:
picaxe in my robot, it’s working, doing robot things. I might plug it into the computer to read the feedback via the sertxd commands in my code.
on the latest occasion, after plugging in the cable to the robot, I seem to have wiped it - it’s invisible to the computer. picaxe seems to have turned into a brick of nothing. It appears that I’ve turned it from a picaxe, into a regular pic (although I don’t know how to check that this is what I have done - other than the observations I mention above).
Now, I don’t know exactly what I did - perhaps I tried to plug/unplug the cable while power was still on to the robot, and perhaps i shorted somthing while I was plugging it in. Suffice to say that whatever I did, I’ve done it twice, now I have two dead picaxe18X chips!, and only two left!
It’s strange, because I’ve done worse things to them in the past - such as putting the chip in the wrong way round (so power goes to the gnd pin, or connected diodes straight to gnd, with no resistor in series. so I was under the impression there were a little more robust, but like I said, I don’t know exactly what I did, I just wanted to know if other people were wiping their picaxes with a similar kind of regularity…
hm, okay, sounds like a possiblity.
Thanks oddbot. I’ll put these into a circuit and try it out. the space inside my robot is getting smaller and smaller…
