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Old 9th Dec 2020, 12:48 am   #147
SiriusHardware
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Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Newcastle, Tyne and Wear, UK.
Posts: 11,482
Default Re: I found it! A very sorry looking MK14.

To be honest I'm not sure what the failure mode or mechanism is.

If one of them appears faulty there would be nothing to lose by trying to over-programme it to see if it recovers. You do, as you say, seem staggeringly unlucky sometimes - worked fine for me here and then for you for the space of just one evening.

There is one relatively high-risk stunt you could try, the 'rap' method which is sometimes used to clear tin whiskers in germanium transistors. Put each IC in turn at one end of a longish piece of IC tubing (with a bung in the tube at the same end), hold the tube by the other end and rap the IC end of the tube smartly on a bench top. This supposes that any regrown whisker will be much more fragile than the links which were never intentionally blown, and will break open.

The risk is that too much shock force may break one of the 'good' fusible links, and if you do manage to shatter the (assumed) regrown, unwanted link there is no telling where the remnants of it could end up.

Using a programmer to try to re-blow a suspected regrown link is a much more targeted and less stressful method.
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