On: The mystery of my desktop that locks up when it ge...

[Kenji]

It can be much simpler than that. Maybe an I/O pin is left floating by accident (neither pulled up or down) and below a certain temperature, it gets toggled and brings the machine down. We actually had this exact problem, but it was the other way around: The floating pin was pulled the wrong way after a certain temperature was surpassed.

[raxxorrax → Kenji]

This kind of problem almost made me go crazy once when developing a simple encoder routine. It is the absolute worst.

"sometimes it does work, so a hardware fault is very unlikely and why isn't my software working if the sun is shining?"

I reimplemented these routines countless times...

Seriously, I was slowly beginning to think to look for a new career. Already getting angry again just thinking about it.

[Scoundreller → Kenji]

Not temperature, but I once had a tiny speck of solder bridge two address lines together on an EEPROM. Drove me nuts figuring out why my attempts to program it kept failing after installing a JTAG when everything else I read worked fine.