Good stuff. Welcome to my world, although I seldom work on any kind of firmware, anymore. I'm mostly about driver-level stuff, and I try to leverage platform transport, as much as possible.
I have blown up $40,000 (in 1987 dollars) devices with software errors.
FUN!
Why do you have to obfuscate the language so much with technical jargon? Just say 'the costliest mistake'.
Just imagine a whole team of people working on a combination of hardware and software, some of the hardware prototype level floating point gear obtained directly from the manufacturer under NDA (that's non disclosure agreement) and then someone decides to drop a dime into the machine.
The dime is the investment, the time it took to cause the damage the factor that you normally would use to indicate your positive gain on that investment, in this case a couple of milliseconds and a few hundred thousand dollars was gone beyond recovery. Project down the drain.
I guess when you explain it it is no longer that funny, and HN is more than capable of decoding the original.
Fortunately a heroic 7400 quad nand gate sacrificed itself to save anyone. He said all that was left was the leads sticking out of the PCB.
My cousin hooked up VCC and gnd backwards and blew up a prototype RISC processor. Only a dozen working ones in existence. Please sir may we have another?
How on earth did you blow something up from software? I'm guessing you were touching power delivery from software for some reason?
I was designing ATE systems, and I accidentally delivered 240 volts to a 110 volt configuration, and discovered the fuse didn't work.