Re: help - weird intermittent resets

On Fri, 29 Jul 2005, Jeff wrote:

> Sounds very much like a problem I had many years ago with a Z80 board 
> running at a comparatively slow 4MHz. Ground and power traces were way 
> too narrow, causing relatively high ground/Vcc resistance and lots of 
> generated noise. Memory would get randomly corrupted, resulting in 
> random resets.

I built a board with a 16F876 a year or two ago with exactly this problem. 
I'd etched the board myself at home, and the ground traces in particular 
ended up a little too narrow by the time everything else on the board 
finished etching. I was able to confirm and correct the problem by 
soldering a length of 30 ga wire wrap wire from the ground point of every 
IC back to the ground connection for the board, in a star configuration 
(rather than a bus configuration). Once I put those extra ground wires on, 
everything worked reliably. Later I remade the board with wider traces, 
and this one worked fine without need for extra ground wires.

Greg