It's static electricity season, and every time I walk around and zap something, a lot of my tech goes haywire, in ways which I have no idea how it's even possible. Like any static shock happening anywhere in my living room or kitchen will cause my Apple TV's screen to go black for about 10 seconds and then when it comes back it'll have been network buffering for a while. And similar weirdness with the webcam on my gaming PC.
This doesn't feel in keeping with FCC Part 15 rules.
okay so I recently got a portable oscilloscope, and I tried measuring the energy potential across my fingers and saw a very clear 60Hz signal, which is, y'know. Unexpected.
Then I unplugged the USB-C charger and that signal mostly (but didn't completely) go away.
I suspect that somewhere in my house, live is being referenced to ground, and that would probably explain a lot of things, like my stove electrocuting me a few months ago (which I assumed to be a problem with the stove, not my house).
@fluffy Speaking as someones who use an oscilloscope very regularly, measuring a 60 Hz signal on your fingers is 100% normal and expected, and entirely unrelated to static electricity.
the stove zapping you is 0% normal and expected, and should absolutely be fixed
-F
@fluffy Seeing the 60 Hz signal on your fingers is just because you're surrounded by 60 Hz radiation at all times, and large bags of mostly-water (i.e. living things) tend to be fairly decent antennas at low frequencies
-F
@Felthry Yeah I mean that makes sense, it's just weird to see it so pronounced, and for the effect to get amplified by the oscilloscope being plugged in to the charger.
But there's definitely something fucky going on with the grounding in my house, given that fairly standard ESD from static electricity sparks is having profound effects on much of the electronics in my house.
@fluffy if it's any reassurance, it would take more energy than we have right now to explain why in detail but it makes perfect sense to us (an electrical engineer who've been studying this for 10 years and doing it as a job for 2) that plugging in the charger to your scope would affect this
as for the esd messing with electronics, yeah that's a bit strange. i don't know the severity of the effects or what's being affected other than the examples you gave, so i can't say much more though
-F
@fluffy yeah something weird's going on there
-F
@Felthry yeah which is why I've ordered an outlet tester which should arrive in a day or two, and I'll specifically be testing the outlets that the crashing hardware is plugged into.
@fluffy Here's hoping it's an easy fix, though grounding issues never are
-F
@Felthry Like the static shocks themselves aren't that alarming, it's cold and dry and I have a lifetime of experience of this happening since I grew up in a much drier climate than where I live now. But having electronic devices crash or glitch out because of it is new to me.
@Felthry Getting a static shock off the door handle of my refrigerator is causing my TV and streaming box the next room over to crash. Same with static electricity shock on the (electrically floating) metal stands for my game streaming gear.