Driver Station ESD sensitivity

[Gdeaver]

This is winter and many commercial buildings do not have humidification as part of there HVAC system. Shame on them. If those who are in the northern part of the country have noticed we have a large arctic air mass sitting on us. With out active humidification the relative humidity in your building may be < 10%. If you could get the RH up to 30 - 40% static would not be an issue. Hopefully at the spring competitions static will not be as bad. All though we are building big Van degraph generators. Back in December i took a discharge from the 2008 robot that left my arm numb for about 3 hours.
It takes allot of engineering to protect electronics from that kind of potential.

[Mark McLeod]

What I found interesting is that it appears to be similar in nature to the problem that the IP receiver had last year.
Upon examination of the one dead DS I've seen, the DS Bootloader is starting, but the Linux kernel does not load. It has the appearance of the memory being scrambled, so the bootstrapper has nothing to load.

One of the rookie teams I mentor had their Driver Station die this past Friday. I just got my hands on it yesterday to check it out.
By reports theirs didn't die immediately, but first became sporatic with the KwikByte logo screen sometimes showing up and at other times just a blank LCD. It now has a blank screen whenever it gets powered up, so it's completely dead. I don't know enough to finger a specific cause, but static discharge is possible.