I had a really long lab today. Class usually goes from 7-10pm. The lab wasn’t that bad, but it had a lot of stuff in it. Took so long. Becuase most of the people in the class had never used these materials before it took a long time. We were using these tiny resistors and putting them into a circuit board, and checking the voltages in them and making rectifiers.
Anyway, we were working on the lab, when we started to see smoke coming from our circuit board. And we then semlled it, and found out we had blown up our diode. Our blue diode iwth a black strip on it had turned all black. It wasn’t nice to see. Several other groups did the same thing. Then the grad student who was teaching the class found out why. He forgot to tell us that the leads we were using to measure the voltages had an internal ground. So we had put the ground clamp on the wrong side of the resistors, and therefore created a short circuit and sent things into smoke. This other lab group had funny diodes. They had burnt theirs up, but it would light up like an LED, and we would see the orange light blink.
So i finished the lab at around 10:36 pm. It was so cold, and there was absolutely nobody around. Except for the campus police escort car which was driving around.
