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Lawsuit Alleges That Palms Damage Motherboards
schussat writes: "This brief AP article describes a lawsuit that alleges that syncing a Palm Pilot "damages or destroys the motherboards on certain PC brands." Does anyone know more or have experience with this? Is it even possible to cause damage? The article is not very detailed."
I can say that I personally saw this occur several times in tech support and those of us who cared to research it saw it as a problem of static electricity and the Palm V cradle through the serial port. The real problem though was ever figuring out if the Palm V's cradle (one of the ones that plugs into the wall to charge the PDA while cradled) was truly at fault or if the motherboards were not grounded properly. Either way, it's gonna be expensive for someone because one of the units isn't quite right. We always replaced the motherboard once but warned that if the cradle was bad, it'd likely zap the replacement motherboard and we wouldn't be keen on constatly replacing a $100+ motherboard because of a $15 cradle. Eventually new revs came out for both units and it seemed to take care of itself like a lot of tech issues do. The proper people get notified and replacements are issued. I don't see why lawsuits need be filed. There are plenty of worse things happening out there to people's systems.
-A Quiet Reader
"No matter where you go... There you are..." --Buckaroo Bonzai
The USB spec explicitly says that the data lines must be able to withstand this sort of thing. In practice, they have bloody great clamp diodes (you've seen them on circuit diagrams, they're the ones connected "backwards", cathode to signal, anode to ground), which absorb the voltage spikes.
You'd have to be hot-plugging a MIG welder into your USB ports to spike them that badly.
I fried the motherboard (at least the serial port, but there seemed to be other damage as well) while synching my palm to my old PC. There's not much doubt in my mind how it happened... I picked up a static charge walking across the carpet with the palm, which then transferred said charge to the serial cable and ... well, boom. Since then, I always touch a grounded surface with the palm in my hand before setting it into its cradle. No problems since on any other machine.
P.S. I wouldn't necessarily blame Palm for this, but it seems like better design on the serial port, or on the cradle, could reduce this problem...
Hey,
The article implies that this is somehow software-based, and most people probably thought 'Bullshit', and rightly so.
A google search for Palm damage motherboard turns up some better articles: This one, and a follow-up here are both pretty good.
The guy making the claim has a page here. The guy (called Greg Gaub) details his story in which his Hewlett packard desktop computer's motherboard was ruined; Greg's claim is that the motherboard was damaged because of a faulty or badly designed Palm V cradle which doesn't dissapate static charges.
Quoth I: As you may be aware, The PalmV and Vx devices have an aluminum casing. They also have a cradle with, in my opinion, a design flaw that does not dissipate static electric charges that travel from a person (holding or reaching for their PalmV) into the cradle, and on into the desktop computer's motherboard via the serial connector.
It does seem a somewhat unlikely problem, but I suppose it could be possible, in theory at least.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
That said, there is a lot of poorly-designed crap out there, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to meet a motherboard that blows itself up under perfectly acceptable conditions.
For consumer equipment, all externally-accessible connectors should be able to take some vicious ESD zaps on every single pin. In fact, the 'CE' requirements in Europe make this a legal requirement. As an example of how much ESD protection is in engineer's minds, take a look at this datasheet for the Maxim MAX3232E RS-232 transciever chip, which has built in +/-15kV ESD protection. (Again, there's a lot of crap being manufactured that can't take ESD like it should.) If the Palm cradle connects to a 'wall wart' transformer to recharge the battery, there is another failure mode: the output of many wall warts is capacitively coupled to the AC power line. The ones I've seen make an approx. 60 VAC sine wave on the output, as measured relative to earth ground. There isn't much current available, and a proper RS-232 design should be able to take it all day long, but I *have* seen equipment that is damaged by it. (At work we're very paranoid about explicitly grounding laptop computers in the electronic labs to keep from frying our prototypes.) Oh, bullshit. It's the engineer's responsibility to design things that will actually work in the real world. Walking up to a piece of office equipment and touching it should *never* cause smoke and/or explosions. It's almost impossible to accidentally blow up a properly designed serial port. Either Palm deliberately and maliciously designed in a destruction circuit, or your motherboard was badly designed. Knowing how crappy commodity motherboards are, I'd bet on the latter. Given that RS-232 is intended to hook up randomly-grounded pieces of equipment with 50meter cables -- and is required by law to include ESD protection in Europe -- there's no point in handling it with kid gloves. Adding optocouplers would cost about US $1.50 per unit. Adding them would mean that the tens of millions of Palm owners with correctly designed computers would be paying a $25,000,000 tax to protect the few people with defective computers. You're forgetting the fourth choice: buy a computer that actually complies with the RS-232 standards, and actually has the run-of-the-mill standard level of ESD protection. Serial ports should be able to take almost anything short of being directly connected to the AC power line. It costs only pennies more to manufacture, and it provides a much better customer experience. (The only catch is that the computer manufacturers have to actually care about doing a good job, as opposed to cranking out an extra few hundred thousand motherboards per month.) I think you under-appreciate how hard it is to design good ESD protection. It's not enough to zap your circuit, and say it has good protection if it keeps working, because ESD damage often just weakens the transistors. Doing it right takes a good theoretical understanding of the circuit, great technician-type skill at performing the tests, and a well-developed sense of paranoia. Designing good ESD protection is a lot like designing cryptographic systems: it's easy to make something that *seems* to work, but very difficult to design something that will be rock solid under years of hard use.All motherboard manufacturers are under *tremendous* schedule pressures. The engineers are being pushed and pushed and pushed to get the design shipping as fast as possible. A two week delay (an ESD fix would probably take 3-4 weeks) costs the company more than a senior engineer's yearly salary, so the tendency is to say 'We zapped it, it works, what the hell let's ship it!' Keerist, with the Rambus and MTH fiascos earlier this year, Intel was shipping motherboards where *the engineers knew the digital functions didn't work*. Their priority for ESD protection was probably two notches higher than picking lint out of their belly buttons.
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