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Author Topic: Smoking pots  (Read 5891 times)

Dylan

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Smoking pots
« on: November 14, 2009, 02:12:29 AM »
Uhh...not that pot. I just had a 500K pot hooked up with alligator clips and all of a sudden it was smoking. What the butt does that mean!? Obviously I'm not hooking that one up again, but I'm curious to why it happened.
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Gordonjcp

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Re: Smoking pots
« Reply #1 on: November 16, 2009, 12:48:44 AM »
You put too much current through it.  When it's at the low resistance end of its scale, you can actually stick quite a high current through it.  They're really only designed to deal with a few tens of milliamps at most (unless they're hefty great wirewounds).

This is why using a variable resistor for a voltage drop crash is a stupid idea, and you should use a proper adjustable regulator circuit ;-)
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