I just made the WIZnet chip on my FEZ Connect shield glow and smoke. :o Unfortunately, I don’t know WHY it decided to do this. Maybe someone has some clues?
I had the FEZ Connect board connected to my Panda II. My Panda II was connected to USB, and I had a 6V power supply connected. I deployed my code, and hit a breakpoint right before calling WIZnet.Enable().
Then I noticed the stream of smoke coming from a nifty little glowing spot on top of the chip.
The only thing that might be weird was that while my Visual Studio was sitting at the breakpoint, I accidentally pressed F5 (run) in a different instance of Visual Studio. So, the 2nd instance of Visual Studio then tried to deploy its code to the Panda II while the 1st instance was already running. Not sure what the implications of that may be.
Sometimes the grounding of the PC (which is distributed all over the place, USB, serial, … everything you connect) doesn’t like some switchmodes.
I don’t know the exact details, but I’m always carefull when connecting grounds of two different switchmodes togetter. It seems like some of them are not fully isolated from the AC input.
I guess for now I’ll just chalk it up as a weird HW problem, and move on to my next board. Luckily, we’ve got plenty of backup boards. But I’ll be sure to post if I see it again (BlueHairBob wanted me to demo the smoke release in our training class today… maybe if I get good at it, I can demo it during the next training class).
