So many issues I’ve made have been fron mechanical issues while probing. Board not properly screwed down in the housing amd grounds ount agains a chassis. A panavise with metal jaws shorts out the pcb. Test probes slip and short things out. confusing intermittent p
Heck, our facility was was taken down because someone had use a multimeter lead to probe the female side of a BMC connecrtor. now I always use a bnc adapter to bana probe lead and do things right
if you can put a bit more effort into yourbsetup to make even a quick troubkeshooting step a bit. The signal path is a master of this
Evaporating alcohol trick to find shorted components as an alternative to thermal imaging camera.
I normally have the majority of power rails on my boards default to the off state, then turn them on one at a time under control of a supervisor MCU which functions as a PMIC (in this case a STM32L031). This is great for prototypes and small-run boards because it lets me change rail sequencing dynamically with a software patch, as well as automating bringup one rail at a time with instant panic-shutdown within milliseconds if a rail doesn’t stabilize when and where it should. This minimizes the chance of hardware damage in case of solder defects or PCB design bugs on a hand soldered prototype.
https://serd.es/2025/09/14/Trigger-crossbar.html