Design engineers often complain that development kits that rely on a host PC provide no isolation. The resulting ground connection between the dev kit and PC can wreak havoc on the dev kit and, worse yet, fry your PC.
Jon Titus, who blogs over at EDN's new DEVmonkey site and has used and reviewed plenty of dev kits in his day, describes the problem and suggests two solutions for frazzled engineers trying to track down elusive grounding problems:
"Take a look at a galvanic isolation device [Jon suggests two options] for the USB bus. Such devices optically isolate the PC side of the USB bus from the application side and eliminate most grounding problems."
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