Tin in solder or some other meals can form spiky crystals when under stress. These whiskers can form short circuits if not properly insulated or not alloyed with other metals.
Someone’s been on !unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org
Hey, tin whiskers! I haven’t seen this happen in person since my Jerry rigged Celeron 333A killed itself. I’d created a monstrous homebrew cooler with raw bar stock aluminum as an IHS with a big fat peltier cooler and a huge heatsink so I could run the thing at 550mhz. The aluminum eventually grew a tin whisker after the machine had been running in my closet for a good 4 or so years and shorted the Celeron carrier board.
Apparently this was a pretty big problem in aerospace back in the early days, their electronics were particularly prone to this failure mode.
I’m not as tech minded as others on this platform. I think you said you were building a space ship in your closet that grew whiskers, and comitted suicide.
That seems like the kind of thing Disney would make an animated film about in the 60s. A child sized rocket thats grown depressed. So instead of flying to space with a kid inside, it instead goes into the closet for so long that it grows whiskers, and then ends it all.
It would be like that scene where bambis mom dies. It’s ONLY there to traumatize kids, and punish parents who now have to deal with a crying kid.
Because Disney is evil.
What happens if I eat one? Do I gain computational powers?
You gain the power to blue screen.
You enter the crank matrix.
Fun fact: Leaded solder is still required in aircraft because it doesn’t grow whiskers like this, while pure tin solder does.
Also it doesn’t suffer from tin plague so much
And the thermal properties in general are better (or better known) too for leaded I think.
It’s a real shame about the brain damage, lead really is an amazing metal
Tin whiskers have also been identified as the cause of some satellites going down too, so spacecraft definitely still using leaded solder.
https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/failures/index.htm
Also recommend looking at the homepage of that site. Lots of cool pictures and research papers on metal whiskering.
Neat. Makes sense that crystalline stuff can do that, but i never really considered it too
Yeah, you don’t often hear about people trimming their motherboards like hedges
Just routine maintenance. Shame engineering schools don’t teach proper solder joint trimming these days
Just throw some clear nail polish on there.
