It happens to the best of us. Cables are too short, people don't look where they're going ... kaboom. (One of the gang worked in Spain many years ago and swears that taut cables at neck-height were the norm. Occasionally a hapless victim would race to answer the phone only to be felled by the cable, at which printers and fax machines would race suddenly across the desk...)
After one near-miss in the FreePlayer bunker, resulting in nothing more serious than a yanked USB cable, it occurred to us how many times we'd accidentally stress-tested our hardware. The top five goes something like this:
1) Leave FreePlayer-equipped guitar on its stand. Then trip over jack cable. Guitar falls face-first on floor. No damage.
2) Solder electronic components while day-dreaming about better pay and conditions (or so he told us). Inadvertantly short-circuit a vital chip. When we connected it, it took us five minutes to work out why we weren't getting a signal, by which time the aforementioned chip was too hot to touch. Ouch. After re-soldering, worked fine. No damage.
3) (Not really accidental, but...) Attach development hardware to guitar, not really thinking about how close it all is to the pickups. Nine months later, the kit is thoroughly magnetized, and ... what do you know?! It still works. No damage.
4) Flying joystick syndrome: An early prototype had a joystick set rather high in the body. Play rhythm, and suddenly see the joystick knob flying across the room as you catch it with the pick. It turned out to be a push fit. No damage.
5) Taking work home with you isn't recommended. Definitely don't leave your guitar on the sofa. And don't leave the room. Then, you won't see a two year old jumping up and down on it when you come back. Aarrgghh. Ah, but she's cute, eh? No damage.
And how did we get started thinking about all this? Well, the mass-customised enclosures (see previous post) are starting to arrive, and somebody asked us how strong they need to be in order to protect our delecate electronics from various hazards (beer spills? standing too close to the pyrotechnics? who knows?). It's difficult to quantify, but it all leaves us with a smug feeling that our kit is really fairly robust.
But we're sure there's somebody out there who will find a way to break it...
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