Personal room design, antistatic room.

I'm intending to turn one of my rooms into a good facility for my robotics work... I have an idea on how to reduce static, and I want advice from an actual electrician, as Roboticists rarely deal with AC.

The floor will be metallic, I already have that arranged. Primarily so that dropped tools wont ruin the floor... it's going to have a factory style stucco tread on it.

Now, I know the best way to remove static from the room is to ground the, well, ground.
considering how electricity works, I won't be able to get electrocuted by attaching the metal floor to the ground terminal in the houses electrical lines.

Is that against building code though? To ground an entire floor?

seriously speaking, static probably simply will not be an issue. ten years of working on computers and computer components, and i have NEVER had a failure from static. improperly seating connections, trying to hot-swap RAM, i've had failures with BIG sparks from those. not one from static.

Ditto. I've worked in the computer industry for 30 years. I have heard (but never experienced in thousands of repairs) of static being a problem. I've also done some roboics work in my home (carpet, cats, everything) and never had a static problem.

When I do work with PCBs and things of the sort I just use an anti-static wrist band. Pretty Nifty

I've killed plenty of stuff with static. But I work with microelectronics all day, so it happens if you're not wearing your strap during the winter.

There's special anti-static linoleum-like flooring you can get, as well as wear antistatic shoes. But simplest and cheapest route is to just wear a static strap.

Originally posted by apc
I've killed plenty of stuff with static. But I work with microelectronics all day, so it happens if you're not wearing your strap during the winter.

There's special anti-static linoleum-like flooring you can get, as well as wear antistatic shoes. But simplest and cheapest route is to just wear a static strap.

Quote for truth. Johnsky, I have rarely obliterated parts with decent internal protection such as most logic and micros, but I have done it. More, smaller parts with low gate capacitance and no protection structures will bite it in the blink of an eye. I toasted a couple dozen FETs one morning when I thought I had my strap plugged in and didn't have my VSE3000 running.

I don't know about using a metallic floor. We've never done that, and I personally would NOT do that. The reason why is, if you are in contact with the floor and it's a metallic connection at 'green ground', and you touch a connection at line potential, you could easily injure or kill yourself.

What we have here is a mix.

On the share lab floor, we use ESD conductive tile laid down over concrete with conductive adhesive. In the adhesive are copper foil strips about a yard apart that go to a copper ground ring in the baseboards, there's a single point earth ground. The tiles are conductive but are in the range of 50-100K, it dissipates static really quickly but not to the point you'd be electrocuted if you got across the line by accident.

In the SCIF there's a solid sheet of really thick copper foil with tile on top that's part of the room shielding. But there's still the tile between you and a metallic ground, so the impedance isn't so low.

We wear foot loops (a couple of guys have static shoes), and I usually go barefoot unless someone's visiting, because I hate foot loops, and have a habit of putting my feet on the chair anyway. If you don't have a foot on the tile the tile doesn't do the job. Which is why we have other stuff.

The lab bench tops have a dissipative mat which is grounded, we have wrist strap jacks every few feet on the bench, and we have my personal favorite, a neutral ion generator over each bench. (peeks) They're Chapman VSE3000s. I love, love, love my 3000. Because I forget to plug in the wrist loop at times. The VSE throws a cloud of mixed positive and negative ions. If you're carrying a charge, the opposite charge ions will come for you and take it away. It also keeps the flux out of your lungs.

You can almost do without the straps if the 3000 is blowing on you, and sometimes I do. If it's a really pricey part, though, Tom doesn't play. Some of the stuff we work with is several thousand a chip, it doesn't do to be careless.

A freind and I tried to kill an old RAM stick once by rubbing our feet on the carpet and zapping it while he held it. Zapped the tripe out of it, still works ok. Other times I've installed brand new RAM that was DOA, supplier test's it and claims static damage. BS. It's like when you send a cheap cellphone away for repair and it comes back liquid damage, warranty not covered. I once had a cellphone that did not work as soon as it came out of a plastic sealed box. Guess what? Liquid damage, no warranty. Some really high end components I would say are susceptible.

Thanks everyone.

I really hate being attached to my desk by that darned static line, I like to move freely about the room.

This gives me some ideas.

I'm not sure what I was thinking with the whole metal floor idea... when I realised I could become part of the circuit, I thought to myself "I'm a dumb@$$"

Anyhow, some good ideas nevertheless.