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Why do manuals always skip the one pin that kills you?
I was tracing a power issue on a Collins RTU-4200 last week and the manual just said 'check pin 14 for voltage.' Turned out pin 14 was the signal ground and the real offender was pin 22 that had a cold solder joint. Took me 3 hours with a multimeter and a prayer to figure it out. Has anyone else had a manual leave out that one critical detail that costs you half a shift?
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dixon.spencer14d ago
You know what gets me about this is nobody talks about how manuals are written by the same engineers who designed the board. So they already know where every trace goes and every pin does what. They don't think about what a regular tech sees when they open the box for the first time. It's like asking a chef to write a recipe for someone who's never boiled water. They leave out the obvious stuff because it's obvious to them. Pin 14 being signal ground makes perfect sense to the guy who laid out the PCB but to me it's just another pin I'm poking with a meter. And then when you finally figure out it was pin 22 all along you feel stupid but really the manual just failed you.
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