I learned an important lesson is safety today

[Gibson486]

I learned to be careful about capacitor polarity. Those big ovals on teh side of the caps are negative signs. Well, I did not know that. I hooked it up to the board and turned on my power supply...I smelt something weird after a few seconds. I look at the board and place my hands over the board, and i find this really hot area. So, instead of turning off the power supply and putting my face close to the board, I decided to look a the board without turning the supply off. After looking straight at the cap.......Boom....it almost exploded right in my face...I fell backwards and landed on the dam chair and it tipped over and i banged my head on the door. Everyone was in a meeting a couple doors down, so the intern was not embarrassed

Lessons learned....

Caps smell awful when the explode

 

[Umberger]

OWNED

edit: lol... i did the same type thing with a few resistors and an op-amp once... as it turns out, 10 ohms is not the same as 10k ohms... i made a smoke emitting circuit! yay!

 

[HomeBrewerDude]

if it doesn't kill you, it will make you stronger

 

[jadinolf]

I'd like to know how they get all of that smoke inside the caps.