Go Banana!

I recently obtained my PhD in Plasma Science and Fusion Energy and fittingly started working at the most successful fusion experiment to date. Suffice it to say, not all of it is as high-tech as one may imagine.

I am working with a team of engineers on a set of diagnostic antennas to probe the fusion plasmas with radio waves. To generate these radio waves and stop them from burning anything out, we have a complicated set of electronics, which must be commissioned before they are used in anger.

We discovered that one of our control units was behaving strangely. A loose connection, perhaps? As we probed around around the unit's motherboard, the requisite lights seemed to flash back to light and flicker out. A closer search revealed that the system could be made to work by touching a particular area of the circuit board.

I quickly hunted down and marked with a sharpie the area where reaching in to our electronics rack with a carefully placed middle finger would bring the system to life. Surely one of us couldn't stand there poking the device into life for hours on end, grumbled my colleagues.

Faced with this challenge, I looked around the room for something to apply sufficient pressure to the marked area. After trying various plastic tools, I thought about approximating a human finger more closely. An orange taken from a lunchbox didn't quite do the trick, but a banana seemed to apply exactly the required pressure and capacitance to fix our circuitry.

Here is how I wedged it in place to allow us to continue testing:

In the end, we were able to successfully finish our tests and subsequently to fix the "floating" grounds causing the problem so that we needn't use any more bananas.