Fairly often I will get a shock when sitting down and touching my keyboard, it will cause my screen to go black for a second. This is obviously not ideal. They keyboard is plugged into a USB hub which is connected to my laptop. Any ideas how to fix this issue?
Do you also get same monitor behaviour if touching metal bits on the laptop? (eg, USB port) I bet the issue is with laptop. The screen going blank is what we want to solve isn't it? Not sure how to solve it though, perhaps touch a radiator when sitting down?
The static is almost certainly caused by wearing man made fibres or walking on nylon carpets so the "fix" is to wear natural fibres. The workaround is to touch something metal that is grounded (like a radiator) before sitting down to discharge yourself. The black screen is probably induced by the high voltage (but low current) "jump" of static to ground that can emit all sorts of radio frequency interference and upset electronics.
I can't be sure, it doesn't happen every time, but does happen around once a day. Is there any way to mitigate this? I assume it will also happen when I build my new desktop?
Easiest solution I can think of is to touch your computer case (assuming metal) before anything else as that will be grounded. Whether that causes your screen to flicker still I cannot say.
In my experience, its wearing synthetic jumpers. Its the action of your arms against your body that usually does it. I don't wear jumpers for that reason! If you're worried about it for build, get something like this. At work I just tap the grounding before i work on anything and that serves me well. If its anything really sensitive, I wear the strap, but no PC parts are that sensitive these days!
I use a wrist strap with a crocodile clip on the end of the wire, which is holding an earth pin, just plugged into a nearby mains socket. 6000V+, even at a very small current, can very easily burn holes in complex ICs. I worked in electronics manufacturing for a number of years, the need for ESD prevention was drummed-in often. These days it may be over cautious but, over caution is better than, "oh sh!t..."
Honestly, the protections systems in modern consumer electronics are so good, its basically impossible! In the video linked above, I think they do 12Kv and its fine. I do a lot of high end embedded systems and they can go either way, either they're OTT, or there's nothing and I'm designing it! And I'm not putting ESD protection on GPIO lines!
I feel I should point out, that I was working in electronics around 25 to 30 years ago… The older you get, the more out of date your knowledge becomes, if you don’t update it.
The stuff I'm playing with would boggle your mind! And you'd probably be massively envious about the software which does so much for me now
