Got a Shock and Now the Buttons Don’t Work!

[jregel]

Hi. I’ve had my MiSTer for a couple of years and everything has been working fine. I have the main board, a USB hub and an analogue I/O board in a stack. For the first time today, I went to touch one of the three buttons on the analogue board and got what felt like an electric shock. I thought it was possibly just static and carried on. I got a couple more shocks a bit later which was odd.

Now I’ve discovered that the three buttons on the analogue board aren’t responding any more!

The rest of the MiSTer seems to be working okay. Games still run, the controllers are okay. In the interest of full disclosure, my activity today was setting up a NSO N64 controller for the first time, using it in a wired configuration. I’m not sure how that would impact it, but thought it was worth a mention.

Any thoughts on what’s happened? Anything I can do to debug this further (ideally from within Linux as I don’t have any tools)? Has anyone else come across this problem?

Thanks for any help!

[jregel]

A quick update to add: It's possible the shocks are unrelated as I managed to get a shock touching the MiSTer when it was off and not plugged in, and separately when touching another computer's case. Perhaps it's just the weather.

Issue with the buttons still remains though.

[MostroW]

Sounds like ESD to me at this point, maybe a component on the analogue board got damaged?

[rhester72]

It's more likely the shock was produced by you as part of a static electricity buildup that was then transferred to the board/components, which is no bueno - MiSTer is particularly susceptible to that without a case and it's ALWAYS a good idea to discharge static before touching bare boards like that.

[rcade]

Yes this is often a very expensive mistake...

[jregel]

Thanks for the replies.

I'm still getting odd issues with the buttons though, but it's not consistent. The Reset and User buttons work in some cores, but not most.

For example, if I go into the "Electron" computer core (23.02.24), I get a "BT Pairing" screen stating "No Bluetooth available". If I dismiss this, then the User button works (it resets the core) and the Reset button works (it resets the MiSTer), but the OSD button doesn't do anything.

If I load the "Personal Computer XT" (23.09.02) core, I get the same "BT Pairing" message and the Reset buttons works (it resets the core), but the OSD and User buttons don't do anything.

But for most other cores, e.g., "BBC Model B/Master 128" (24.05.02) or "Commodore 64" (24.04.18), I don't get the "BT Pairing" message and none of the buttons do anything.

Any ideas what's happening?

Thanks!

[FPGA64]

You have fried part of the DE10. That behaviour is caused when the de10 thinks the buttons are being pressed. When you gave it a static shock you damaged the DE10.

[jregel]

You have fried part of the DE10. That behaviour is caused when the de10 thinks the buttons are being pressed. When you gave it a static shock you damaged the DE10.

But if that was the case, presumably it wouldn't work for any of the cores?

[FPGA64]

Well then I have no idea how you have damaged it. But a spark and then buttons failing is a sign of De10 damage