Hi, Why am I wearing the lab coat? Well, it's myth busting time going to revisit an old myth I did back right in episode number three. it's the pink antistatic bag myth. Now as the myth goes, um, these pink antistatic bags and also these antistatic tubes. Antistatic? okay in quote marks, they're supposed to protect your Ic's and well, that it really is a myth And I said that back in episode three.

These do not protect your devices at all I can just zap my chips straight through this bag and straight through that antistatic tube. What you need is one of these metal shielding bags. Now what I did in episode three is I just talked about it I didn't actually demonstrate it so I thought I'd do just that for this episode. It's really interesting and what prompted me to do this is um, Element 14f Fars: if you've been following my tweets, they actually this is how they sent me my chips.

No proper static shielding bag at all. They just sent it in the antistatic tube and the antistatic pink ESD bag. Not good enough, not by a long shot. Somebody wasn't thinking, didn't have their head screwed on.

but if that happened to the company and you ordered them, they would. You would find out Element 4 would fail an ESD order, they it be blacklisted and all hell it break loose. So you got to take ESD seriously if you're a component distributor and not only just shipping the stuff because that's uh, important but handling in your factory as well Now Uh, granted they they did actually call me up and admitted that yes, they're aware of it, they screwed up. It came from their Singapore Factory or something and they're investigating whatever.

So anyway, I thought it'd be a real interesting thing to actually do a real test. Can we see the difference between a proper static shielding bag? One of these ESD bags? Let's go. The only good thing that this an that this anti-static tube is going to do is that when you handle it and move it around the surface itself, the plastic surface is not going to build up a static charge because it is actually uh, treated with an antistatic uh, an antistatic material that actually stops the charge building up on the surface of the plastic. And this pink anti-static bag that uh, the Element 14 Parts actually came in is no different to this plastic.

It's just like a it's in this case it's probably just like a polyester type bag and it is coated with an anti-static material. uh, hence giving it that pink uh sort of effect. but they don't necessarily always have to be uh Pink Like that they can actually be clear like these uh tubes. Now these antistatic bags are also known as static dissipative.

So if you see it's the same thing. static dissipative is effectively the same thing as anti static. So what you need to protect your devices is one of these static shielding bags. Typically, uh, they'll have like a metal uh, film inside of them.

and they're They're kind, not, uh, quite as see-through as the other bags. But once you put your chips inside one of these static shielding bags or a conductive bag, you can also get a black uh bag with which is actually conductive that'll do exactly the same thing. and once your devices are in there, you can throw them around. Do whatever you want, zap, try and zap them and you won't be able to actually kill the devices inside.

But these bags and these tubes do absolutely nothing. I can walk up to this if I'm charged. I can go zap and kill that device right through that bag and that tube. So why bother having these bags and these tubes at all if they're no good for protection? Well, the idea is that they do not build up a charge.

So when you're using them on your uh ESD uh mat like this or you're in what's called your ESD safe area where everything's uh, grounded. you've got your wrist strap on and everything. everything on these benches on in an antistatic area should be. uh, static, disappear.

It should be antistatic. So I can Shuffle this around the surface like this and it's not going to build up a charge. I can get two bags like this and I can actually rub them to together. like this, two bags and they will not actually build up a charge because that's how you build up a charge using the Tribo electric effect.

You get two different materials and you rub them like that. You're familiar with that. you know, walking across the carpet or rubbing your jumper with something with a you know, comb. Things like that.

You can generate static charge between two surfaces. So how are we going to test this? Well, what I've got here is a Surface DC Voltmeter and this will actually give me a direct read out in thousands of volts. I.E Kilovolts uh at on any surface that is behind this metal sensor plate on the back. So we can actually measure the charge on a surface and also see if uh, any charge gets through.

um, these pink ESD bags or the static shielding bag and to generate a spark? I've What I've done is I've got one of these little um p Electric spark generators. There it goes like that and we can generate. Ouch! Got myself there. We can generate a spark and I actually got this out of one of these uh, butane barbecue lighters.

One of the trigger based things. You pull the trigger and the flame comes out because the spark at the end of this p Electric igniter generates the butane coming from here and you can get them out of cigarette lighters and all sorts of things. So um, it's not exactly the best. I'd rather use a proper uh ESD gun.

You can't actually buy proper guns which actually generate what's called a human body model charge like it's a no and designated charge in into your device, but we don't have that I think this will be a decent substitute? Let's try it out. You need about 10 KT or so rough rule of thumb per cm per 10 mm to jump across there like that, but it depends on the um, atmospheric, uh, conditions, and all sorts of stuff. Okay, so let's do some practical demonstrations if we can. I've got my Surface DC Voltmeter here and as I said, it measures directly in Kilovolt.

So what you're reading is 1.00 Kilt So that is 8 volts at the moment that is displaying and that's relative to 1 in below the surface of that plate there. So um, if I reset it as you can see, I've got it uh, grounded to my anti static mat underneath. So I'll zoom out here and we can put various things under under here and we can actually see the effect of the charge on those surfaces now. I'm just standing here.

I've got my lab code on not that that matters, but I'm not. Haven't got my wrist strap um on at all. And uh, there you go. 30 30 odd volts, That's what.

my, that's what my body's actually at. You know, your regular bubble wrap that you're no doubt familiar with and let's put it under here and see what is it's generating Many hundreds, 500 odd volts in this case. Uh, negative. Uh, 500 Vols Now let's take some uh, Myar uh wrapping which is from my MakerBot and let's put that under there and have a look at that.

W Look at that. 2,000 volts, 3,000 volts Huge M Gener generating massive voltages on the surface. 4,000 volts generating massive voltages as I Peel that off and the triber electric effect is H Working on that Myar wrapping. This is horrible stuff.

Let's take our pink Fel bag and put that under there. Look, it's generating nothing and that's exactly what you'd expect. That's what these antistatic bags are designed to do. They're not designed to build up a charge at all no matter how you handle them.

Here's another pink one. I'm rubbing them together like this and we can't generate anything at all. These These are doing exactly what they're supposed to do. They're anti-static How about a drawer of resistors? One of these non antistatic uh drawers in non- antistatic bags.

And of course, they're not really going to kill the resistors in there, but if you put that under there, it generates. There's hundreds of volts, so probably the last thing you want to do is throw your chips directly in one of these non, uh, static, dissipative non- antistatic drawers. in fact. Uh, the good quality component drawers? They will be made of a conductive plastic.

So what happens when we get our little spark generator here? and we do some stuff on under it? There we go: 11 kts, 14 KS and that's actually charge building up on the surface of the Uh plate in there. so that will actually stay there now and build up. and this one only goes to 20 kts maximum. There you go.

it's overloaded. So what happens when we stick our static generator inside one of these pink? Uh, the Fel pink ESD bag? Well, let's give it a go bang. Overloaded. There you go.

We just Zapped straight through this pink ESD bag. Not a problem at all. not surprising. So let's now try one of these static shielding bags.

Let's put it inside here and see if we can generate the same charge now. I've got to be careful not to touch the uh bottom plate here cuz I can actually if I do that with the bag. Um, just the bag on its own can actually induce voltage. You're not actually supposed to touch that plate so we'll reset that.

Okay, I'll try and it's inside the bag. I'll try and get it as close as possible to the sensor and there you go. It's not generating, that's only a couple of millim away from the sensor plate, and it's generating no charge at all cuz nothing is escaping that bag and it doesn't matter whether it's from inside out or from outside in, you put your devices in here. they're fully protected and if you're wondering about that antistatic tube, well, it's not going to do anything either.

Let's it's going to work exactly like the pink. ESD Bag Bang There We go 4 and 1 half. 5,000 volts. Not a problem.

Now here's an interesting one. I've got the digilent Chipkit Max 32 board in here and let's take a look at it. What does it come with in the packaging? There's this foam on the bottom of it doesn't look like uh, a SD foam. To me, it's not the pink stuff.

It's not conductive. Looks like regular foam. H Let's try it out. Shall we remove this? Look at that? couple hundred volts right there look that's nasty I could generate in the order of look Kilovolts was going up to Kilovolts there.

That's rather nasty stuff when you don't use proper ESD material now. Um, granted, a, uh, a fully populated board like this is pretty robust, so the odds of killing it are very small. but still, that is not proper ESD protection at all. Crazy.

Look at that. 4 Kilts And let's try that same thing. if you got proper conductive foam. not a problem whatsoever.

generates nothing and there you go. Yes, it is actually conductive about 5k and again, with one of these little embed platforms it comes on Tada pink anti static foam. and let's play around with this to our heart's content. Rub the pins, do whatever play around.

Not a problem whatsoever. You get this horrible non antistatic foam stuff. Look at that. thousands of volts.

So although these static shielding bags will protect any device you put inside, it's only if all of the objects, including the tubes, all the foam material inside is anti-static as well or static dissipative if you put one of these this horrible looking thing inside that can generate thousands of volts. If you stick that inside there with your devices, you're screwed. All right. So enough of that.

How about we actually try and kill a chip? Well, I've got a 4,000 series Seamos device here and an MC uh, 14569 and I've got it just flashing an LED to show that it actually works. So what we'll do is we'll start a baseline I Switch it off. We've got a working chip. let's take it out.

I'll just get rid of that for a second and let's try and kill it, shall we? This is pretty nasty stuff for a 4,000 series Seos device. So this is a real Baseline test. This is direct ly on the chip itself and let's put it back just as a reference to see if we can actually kill one of these things. And yep, there you go.

Bingo Dead. So we were able to kill it. so we've got a baseline. Let's see if we can do that through various antistatic uh protection devices.

So let's actually give this a go. I'm going to switch off the power there. take the chip out, going to put it in a anti-static tube, and let's see if we can kill it, generate away. Woohoo! it's going over the top surface there.

Oh, that's interesting. Check this out. Who? look on the scope here too. Higher voltage is being applied to the waveform generator.

B and C Oops. Anyway, let's take it back down and let's uh, take that out. Hope I didn't kill my uh function Gen but it at least knows and what. There you go.

Well I don't know. we might have killed our function. Genen Let me. uh, no, there we go.

The waveform Jen's on. No, we couldn't kill it. Going to have to try harder. So what we got is our working circuit.

switch it off, take out the chip, and I'll put it inside one of these pink ESD bags. Now, because we're dealing with a surface in addition to the air here, it's These bags do actually provide a modicum tiny amount of protection just because they're not direct contact and so I'll fold it over like that and that'll give us a better path to try and get our spark to jump through the bag. which is what we want, not over the surface. like.

if I put it like that, you'll probably see it jump over the surface like that. There we go. We don't want that, we want to go through we want. Ah, I saw it jump through the bag, then didn't jump over it.

jumped well and truly through that bag. Which of course is the whole point. Oh, it's supposed to be able to do this, but it's going to be harder to destroy this device than it was just when we were doing direct contact or very close to it in free air. There we go.

Ahha, We killed it. We got it to die through one of these pink ESD bags. It was more difficult than it was just in free air. That's because it does actually provide some barer.

If we had a proper ESD gun, we would find it to probably go straight through this really easily. but it took a little bit of work there to actually get it to finally kill the device. but we did. So there you go.

I'm going to call that myth bustard these pink ESD bags and the one the Fel one came in. They do not provide protection for your devices. They provide a little tiny amount just for the fact that they're um, actually, uh, you know, an extra distance away and they're not an air gap. but that's that's all they're not designed for ESD protection at all.

They just won't build up a charge on the surface. and I hope we've proven that. today. would have been better if we had an ESD gun.

Um, we couldn't kill one within a tube because the distances in there are greater and the wall is thicker. if we had a proper ESD gun, I Have little doubt that we would have eventually been able to kill a device directly through one of these ESD tubes as well. And I won't bore you with the details. But no, I could not kill anything inside one of these static shielding bags.

And no surprise, that's what they designed to handle. They've been tested to do that, so once you put your devices in there, they're fully protected. Myth? Busted. Catch it next time.