Last night I had a lightning strike nearby and one of two displays blanked for a second. It's behind a UPS and a good surge protector. Likely some EMI/RFI getting into the power and/or display cable of the monitor itself, toppling digital circuits in the panel and waking up the watch dog. The same display has also blanked in the infrequent case where I've discharged static on the mouse: the cables are all parallel, so they'll couple and bounce the panel ground plane, with the same outcome.
These devices are built to the edge of performance margins. Throw in some high voltage transients and things flip out. I think displays are particularly susceptible due to long cables, large surface area and unavoidable shape of common displays: they're effectively patch antennas.
The furniture static case is amusing: I imagine some foam cushions can cause millions of tiny static discharges in parallel when they expand. This will flow through the metal stand to "ground" and probably make a VHF range RFI spike (based on the size of a typical chair frame.) Common 24-27" display panel geometry just happens to be in the same neighborhood...
Adding ferrites to cables, as I see suggested several times, might help. You could also get unlucky and make it worse: choke a line to just the right length an it becomes a better inductor/antenna. Electricity is fun.
Might want to increase humidity. In ESD rooms the humidity is controlled and kept high to reduce static build up.
to add:
> In my particular case, my chair wheels are made out of plastic (non-conductive), so my solution was to “ground” my chair by adding a metallic chain from the chair to my room floor. I got the idea from reddit.
The chain grounded chair is used all the time in ESD rooms. The floors in these rooms use semi-conductive flooring which is tied to a ground rod. The chair is grounded to the floor which is in turn ground bonded to earth.
This. I had a huge problem with static shocking my desk in the dry winter air, causing my monitor to blank out for a few seconds. A small, quiet ultrasonic humidifier completely eliminated the problem.
On a side note, distilled water is highly recommended with ultrasonic humidifiers. Heat-based devices evaporate solely the water and leave mineral deposits behind. Ultrasonics create tiny droplets _along with the dissolved minerals_. Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
Distilled water is somewhat expensive, and humidifiers chew through water in the winter (at least here). I quickly switched away from ultrasonic for that reason, 6-8 litres of distilled water per day for a medium sized apartment is not sustainable. Evaporative with tap water and biocides is the way to go.
The air outside is extremely dry (<5% relative humidity once heated to indoor temperatures), and the air is quickly replaced by the ventilation. I have anecdotely heard that in the US they have much lower requirements of rate of air replacement than here in Sweden though, so maybe that could work there, but then you would also have stale air, which doesn't sound great.
> Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
Also, y'know, your lungs. Deep inside your lungs.
Running tap water in an ultrasonic humidifer's going to spike the particulate pollution (PM1/2.5/10) throughout your entire house by hundreds of ug/m^3. And it seems that children are particularly prone to inhaling this stuff and having it deposited in their lungs (~2x more particles and ~3.5x more mass).
They really shouldn't be used with anything except distilled water. The things should come with a continuity tester that disables them if the water's conductive or something.
Ferrite chokes easily fix this problem. Very useful to have a box of them in an office full of people.
It’s pretty clear that most modern standards (HDMI, DisplayPort, thunderbolt, etc) are so close to their physical limits that there’s no more room for errors.
Ferrite beads are awesome, and I agree that everyone involved with computing and electronical things should have an assortment of them nearby. They can fix problems.
And yeah, we're pretty close to the limits. We always have been, though: At all points on the timeline of digital electronics, we've been pushing speeds to be as fast as we can manage today. But tomorrow (and the next day, and the day after that), we'll solve more of the problems and yet-again make it even faster.
Which brings us back to...ferrite beads, and problems.
I got introduced to Monoprice back when HDMI was still new and somewhat finicky, when stores like Best Buy were fond of selling $180 HDMI cables (and even Wal-Mart wanted something like $60). In that crazy world, Monoprice was the place to buy inexpensive cables that worked.
And it was clear that HDMI was the future, so I placed an order for a half-dozen or so different-colored HDMI cables with ferrites pre-installed near each end.
They showed up, and... they barely worked. They were glitchy, touchy, and intermittent. I was frustrated, and I felt like I'd made a poor decision that cost me money instead of saved me money. In fact, I was rather pissed off by all of this.
With nothing to lose, I used a knife to cut away the plastic overmolding on the ferrites on one of the cables that was being particularly problematic. And then I smashed those ferrites with a hammer.
With the ferrites thus-removed, the cable immediately began working perfectly. It was glitch-free. I couldn't get it to misbehave even if I tried. I repeated this with all of the other cables from that order and they all started working perfectly, too.
---
So, ferrites. Their presence adds a little bit of series-mode inductance. And that's something that can be useful. It slows down the edge of things like transient voltage spikes. And since the spikes are transient, slowing their rise-time in this way reduces their bandwidth and peak amplitude. Adding a snap-on ferrite bead can be enough to turn a problematic data bus into a well-behaved data bus.
But! They're just dumb hunks of minerals. They're indiscriminate. They can't distinguish betwixt the bad signals and the good signals -- everything is affected. So while ferrites can be useful in a fight against unwanted noise, they can also be destructive of the signals that we're trying to use.
They're good to have available, but they're also not necessarily something that someone should go forth and attach to every cable they find. If there's no problem that needs solved, then there's no solving to be done.
(These I days I make it a point to actively avoid buying cables that have ferrites pre-installed, both professionally and at home. But I've got a stash of snap-on ferrites in the top drawer of the toolbox just in case; it's good to have options.)
Make sure that all your wall outlets in the area are actually grounded. Get an outlet tester at a hardware store and check. They cost about $10. Good first step. There are sometimes 3-prong outlets where the ground connection is not connected, especially in older buildings. This is an electrical code violation, so if there's a landlord involved, get them to fix it.
Laptop plus external monitor is an interesting case. The monitor should be grounded via its power plug, but the laptop's ground may be floating. Not sure about the grounding path for Apple laptops. Attempts to find info on laptop grounding online are returning AI slop.
If everything is running off 2-prong plug external power supplies, there may not be any grounding.
Get the room humidity above 40% and most static effects will disappear. The water in the air grounds them out. That's often the easiest solution.
There are electrostatic field meters. Halfway decent ones start around US$150. I used to have a surplus store field detector on my desk when assembling electronics. It would squawk if the field level got high. Wearing a wrist strap would shut it up. With a meter, you stop guessing. This isn't mysterious, just something that needs instrumentation to chase down.
The chair chain is good, but make sure that the shiny enameled chain and the floors are actually conductive.
This has happened at our company so many times... I thought I was crazy when it seemed to be related to static electricity. But it was obvious when someone got zapped and it immediately blacked the monitor.
It looks like the youtube embed is broken. It is supposed to link to a EEV blog video. It is wild how many times someone brings me broken equipment and it turns out EEV blog has already investigated the same issue for the same device.
This has been happening forever but only on my bike trainer setup. I have a laptop and an external display mounted in front of my handlebars. The screen will reliably go blank when I remove my outer layer as I start to warm up. I tried grounding myself but that didn’t seem to help. I had just assumed static electricity due to the Lycra shorts rubbing against the saddle. Maybe the ferrites will work.
I'm having the same problem, except it's crashing my dang PC. Actually, it's only crashing the GPU, but that's pretty indistinguishable from the whole PC crashing in practice.
Now I'm wondering if I should ground my chair to the shelf my PC is sitting on.
As pretty obvious evidence this is static related, it only happens in the winter.
I've had the same problem for a couple years - specifically the GPU crashing. Had a very hard time isolating the issue - seems like a mix of static + the EMI spike OP talks about (it happens most reliably when I stand up quickly from my desk chair).
My guess is that, like OP, we're both getting interference in the our DP connections, and that that interference is in our cases causing the GPUs to crash.
Haven't had a chance to try ferrite cores yet but that was going to be my first test.
Many years ago I had a LG CRT that often would turn off in the exact moment I entered the bedroom. The monitor was configured to go to sleep after 20 or so minutes of inactivity, so it was supposed to turn off on its own. And I always assumed it was a case of only noticing it when it did happen (like when you buy a car and suddenly start seeing the same model everywhere)... But it always seemed uncannily frequent... Now I wonder if I might have somehow disturbed the electric field each time
I replaced some ceiling boob lights with flush-mounted LED panels -- they are a nice warm color, and I like them. I have a UHF/VHF antenna in my attic and I use it once a year to watch the Superbowl.
I found out this year that my reception is horrendous if those lights are on. The coax cable which goes from the attic to the TV downstairs runs right above the lights and the LED driver / PWM noise must couple with the coaxial cable. I'm not running anything fancy like RG6 since I just re-used whatever cable was already run up there from the 70s.
I played with a negative ion generator at my desk, and it was great at knocking out my 1440p monitor signal, but the 1080p seemed more resilient.
Since then I got a 4K display, and it likes to drop out in thunderstorms. I switched to a better DP to HDMI adapter, and the chunky original Samsung cable. I'm waiting for the next storm to see if it helps.
Some folks are suggesting ferrite beads, others are suggesting shorter cables.
If one has a medium-sized chunk of money to burn, one could try fiber optic cabling. I've personally had -AFAICT- perfect results from Monoprice's "SlimRun AV" fiber DisplayPort cables, and Nippon Labs' fiber HDMI cables. [0] I expect that Monoprice's fiber HDMI cables and Nippon Labs' fiber DisplayPort cables are also fine, but I've never used those, so I cannot comment.
For folks concerned about "dreadfully fragile" fiber optic cables, I do know that the Monoprice cables are durable... a vigorous misadventure caused me to torque the hell out of the monitor-side connector. The connector bent, forcing the case split a bit at the seam. After some counter-bending of the connector and pushing its case back mostly closed, the cable works fine. Given the outward similarity in build quality, I expect that the Nippon Labs cable I have is at least as durable.
[0] Both families of cables drive my "4k" HDR monitor at 60Hz without lossy compression.
I have the exact same problem, except it affects my cheapo keyboard. Almost every time I move from my desk, the Num/Caps/Scroll Lock LEDs flash up as the controller restarts. And since it's a PS/2 model, if I'm holding a key and let it go as I'm standing up, it never sends the termination sequence and keeps typing it until I press it again.
I'll definitely try some of the tricks from this article.
I have a similar problem, except instead of shutting things down, static discharge seems to wake my computer up (from suspend-to-ram). I have yet to figure out why that happens, but it's not the mouse or keyboard.
My guess is that, in the vein of the "monitor flickering" symptom, your PC sees the DP/HDMI cable disconnect and reconnect due to the static. The reconnection wakes it up.
I don't know. Manually {dis,re}connecting the cable doesn't wake the PC up, but it's too hard to reproduce reliably to tell if having it disconnected makes a difference.
I find this very interesting, especially given that there is a paper from 1993 (linked in the artcile) that explains the issue, but it is still happening - and maybe nowadays even more than ever?
Last night I had a lightning strike nearby and one of two displays blanked for a second. It's behind a UPS and a good surge protector. Likely some EMI/RFI getting into the power and/or display cable of the monitor itself, toppling digital circuits in the panel and waking up the watch dog. The same display has also blanked in the infrequent case where I've discharged static on the mouse: the cables are all parallel, so they'll couple and bounce the panel ground plane, with the same outcome.
These devices are built to the edge of performance margins. Throw in some high voltage transients and things flip out. I think displays are particularly susceptible due to long cables, large surface area and unavoidable shape of common displays: they're effectively patch antennas.
The furniture static case is amusing: I imagine some foam cushions can cause millions of tiny static discharges in parallel when they expand. This will flow through the metal stand to "ground" and probably make a VHF range RFI spike (based on the size of a typical chair frame.) Common 24-27" display panel geometry just happens to be in the same neighborhood...
Adding ferrites to cables, as I see suggested several times, might help. You could also get unlucky and make it worse: choke a line to just the right length an it becomes a better inductor/antenna. Electricity is fun.
Might want to increase humidity. In ESD rooms the humidity is controlled and kept high to reduce static build up.
to add:
> In my particular case, my chair wheels are made out of plastic (non-conductive), so my solution was to “ground” my chair by adding a metallic chain from the chair to my room floor. I got the idea from reddit.
The chain grounded chair is used all the time in ESD rooms. The floors in these rooms use semi-conductive flooring which is tied to a ground rod. The chair is grounded to the floor which is in turn ground bonded to earth.
This. I had a huge problem with static shocking my desk in the dry winter air, causing my monitor to blank out for a few seconds. A small, quiet ultrasonic humidifier completely eliminated the problem.
On a side note, distilled water is highly recommended with ultrasonic humidifiers. Heat-based devices evaporate solely the water and leave mineral deposits behind. Ultrasonics create tiny droplets _along with the dissolved minerals_. Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
Distilled water is somewhat expensive, and humidifiers chew through water in the winter (at least here). I quickly switched away from ultrasonic for that reason, 6-8 litres of distilled water per day for a medium sized apartment is not sustainable. Evaporative with tap water and biocides is the way to go.
The air outside is extremely dry (<5% relative humidity once heated to indoor temperatures), and the air is quickly replaced by the ventilation. I have anecdotely heard that in the US they have much lower requirements of rate of air replacement than here in Sweden though, so maybe that could work there, but then you would also have stale air, which doesn't sound great.
> Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
Also, y'know, your lungs. Deep inside your lungs.
Running tap water in an ultrasonic humidifer's going to spike the particulate pollution (PM1/2.5/10) throughout your entire house by hundreds of ug/m^3. And it seems that children are particularly prone to inhaling this stuff and having it deposited in their lungs (~2x more particles and ~3.5x more mass).
They really shouldn't be used with anything except distilled water. The things should come with a continuity tester that disables them if the water's conductive or something.
Evaporative > Ultrasonic, hands down.
Ferrite chokes easily fix this problem. Very useful to have a box of them in an office full of people.
It’s pretty clear that most modern standards (HDMI, DisplayPort, thunderbolt, etc) are so close to their physical limits that there’s no more room for errors.
Ferrite beads are awesome, and I agree that everyone involved with computing and electronical things should have an assortment of them nearby. They can fix problems.
And yeah, we're pretty close to the limits. We always have been, though: At all points on the timeline of digital electronics, we've been pushing speeds to be as fast as we can manage today. But tomorrow (and the next day, and the day after that), we'll solve more of the problems and yet-again make it even faster.
Which brings us back to...ferrite beads, and problems.
I got introduced to Monoprice back when HDMI was still new and somewhat finicky, when stores like Best Buy were fond of selling $180 HDMI cables (and even Wal-Mart wanted something like $60). In that crazy world, Monoprice was the place to buy inexpensive cables that worked.
And it was clear that HDMI was the future, so I placed an order for a half-dozen or so different-colored HDMI cables with ferrites pre-installed near each end.
They showed up, and... they barely worked. They were glitchy, touchy, and intermittent. I was frustrated, and I felt like I'd made a poor decision that cost me money instead of saved me money. In fact, I was rather pissed off by all of this.
With nothing to lose, I used a knife to cut away the plastic overmolding on the ferrites on one of the cables that was being particularly problematic. And then I smashed those ferrites with a hammer.
With the ferrites thus-removed, the cable immediately began working perfectly. It was glitch-free. I couldn't get it to misbehave even if I tried. I repeated this with all of the other cables from that order and they all started working perfectly, too.
---
So, ferrites. Their presence adds a little bit of series-mode inductance. And that's something that can be useful. It slows down the edge of things like transient voltage spikes. And since the spikes are transient, slowing their rise-time in this way reduces their bandwidth and peak amplitude. Adding a snap-on ferrite bead can be enough to turn a problematic data bus into a well-behaved data bus.
But! They're just dumb hunks of minerals. They're indiscriminate. They can't distinguish betwixt the bad signals and the good signals -- everything is affected. So while ferrites can be useful in a fight against unwanted noise, they can also be destructive of the signals that we're trying to use.
They're good to have available, but they're also not necessarily something that someone should go forth and attach to every cable they find. If there's no problem that needs solved, then there's no solving to be done.
(These I days I make it a point to actively avoid buying cables that have ferrites pre-installed, both professionally and at home. But I've got a stash of snap-on ferrites in the top drawer of the toolbox just in case; it's good to have options.)
Make sure that all your wall outlets in the area are actually grounded. Get an outlet tester at a hardware store and check. They cost about $10. Good first step. There are sometimes 3-prong outlets where the ground connection is not connected, especially in older buildings. This is an electrical code violation, so if there's a landlord involved, get them to fix it.
Laptop plus external monitor is an interesting case. The monitor should be grounded via its power plug, but the laptop's ground may be floating. Not sure about the grounding path for Apple laptops. Attempts to find info on laptop grounding online are returning AI slop. If everything is running off 2-prong plug external power supplies, there may not be any grounding.
Get the room humidity above 40% and most static effects will disappear. The water in the air grounds them out. That's often the easiest solution.
There are electrostatic field meters. Halfway decent ones start around US$150. I used to have a surplus store field detector on my desk when assembling electronics. It would squawk if the field level got high. Wearing a wrist strap would shut it up. With a meter, you stop guessing. This isn't mysterious, just something that needs instrumentation to chase down.
The chair chain is good, but make sure that the shiny enameled chain and the floors are actually conductive.
This has happened at our company so many times... I thought I was crazy when it seemed to be related to static electricity. But it was obvious when someone got zapped and it immediately blacked the monitor.
It looks like the youtube embed is broken. It is supposed to link to a EEV blog video. It is wild how many times someone brings me broken equipment and it turns out EEV blog has already investigated the same issue for the same device.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-V_Z3bD_PA
Remember the "degauss" button? I had no idea what it did, but the sound it made sure was satisfying.
https://youtube.com/shorts/R0OhD2Bc6FY
That attempted to demagnetize the components in the CRT that could cause beam deflection and warped colors.
That "component" was the shadow mask: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask.
This has been happening forever but only on my bike trainer setup. I have a laptop and an external display mounted in front of my handlebars. The screen will reliably go blank when I remove my outer layer as I start to warm up. I tried grounding myself but that didn’t seem to help. I had just assumed static electricity due to the Lycra shorts rubbing against the saddle. Maybe the ferrites will work.
I'm having the same problem, except it's crashing my dang PC. Actually, it's only crashing the GPU, but that's pretty indistinguishable from the whole PC crashing in practice.
Now I'm wondering if I should ground my chair to the shelf my PC is sitting on.
As pretty obvious evidence this is static related, it only happens in the winter.
I've had the same problem for a couple years - specifically the GPU crashing. Had a very hard time isolating the issue - seems like a mix of static + the EMI spike OP talks about (it happens most reliably when I stand up quickly from my desk chair).
My guess is that, like OP, we're both getting interference in the our DP connections, and that that interference is in our cases causing the GPUs to crash.
Haven't had a chance to try ferrite cores yet but that was going to be my first test.
Curious what system specs you have in case we have overlap in anything that could isolate the issue. Mine: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Xpdb8Z
Many years ago I had a LG CRT that often would turn off in the exact moment I entered the bedroom. The monitor was configured to go to sleep after 20 or so minutes of inactivity, so it was supposed to turn off on its own. And I always assumed it was a case of only noticing it when it did happen (like when you buy a car and suddenly start seeing the same model everywhere)... But it always seemed uncannily frequent... Now I wonder if I might have somehow disturbed the electric field each time
I replaced some ceiling boob lights with flush-mounted LED panels -- they are a nice warm color, and I like them. I have a UHF/VHF antenna in my attic and I use it once a year to watch the Superbowl.
I found out this year that my reception is horrendous if those lights are on. The coax cable which goes from the attic to the TV downstairs runs right above the lights and the LED driver / PWM noise must couple with the coaxial cable. I'm not running anything fancy like RG6 since I just re-used whatever cable was already run up there from the 70s.
Florescent lighting in the bathroom?
I played with a negative ion generator at my desk, and it was great at knocking out my 1440p monitor signal, but the 1080p seemed more resilient.
Since then I got a 4K display, and it likes to drop out in thunderstorms. I switched to a better DP to HDMI adapter, and the chunky original Samsung cable. I'm waiting for the next storm to see if it helps.
My hdmi cable causes my headset dongle’s range to significantly decrease. From like 50+ feet to 10.
Happened to me too with a new chair.
I suspected static electricity. The solution was a thin cotton pillow on the seat. Problem gone.
Some folks are suggesting ferrite beads, others are suggesting shorter cables.
If one has a medium-sized chunk of money to burn, one could try fiber optic cabling. I've personally had -AFAICT- perfect results from Monoprice's "SlimRun AV" fiber DisplayPort cables, and Nippon Labs' fiber HDMI cables. [0] I expect that Monoprice's fiber HDMI cables and Nippon Labs' fiber DisplayPort cables are also fine, but I've never used those, so I cannot comment.
For folks concerned about "dreadfully fragile" fiber optic cables, I do know that the Monoprice cables are durable... a vigorous misadventure caused me to torque the hell out of the monitor-side connector. The connector bent, forcing the case split a bit at the seam. After some counter-bending of the connector and pushing its case back mostly closed, the cable works fine. Given the outward similarity in build quality, I expect that the Nippon Labs cable I have is at least as durable.
[0] Both families of cables drive my "4k" HDR monitor at 60Hz without lossy compression.
I have the exact same problem, except it affects my cheapo keyboard. Almost every time I move from my desk, the Num/Caps/Scroll Lock LEDs flash up as the controller restarts. And since it's a PS/2 model, if I'm holding a key and let it go as I'm standing up, it never sends the termination sequence and keeps typing it until I press it again.
I'll definitely try some of the tricks from this article.
I have a similar problem, except instead of shutting things down, static discharge seems to wake my computer up (from suspend-to-ram). I have yet to figure out why that happens, but it's not the mouse or keyboard.
My guess is that, in the vein of the "monitor flickering" symptom, your PC sees the DP/HDMI cable disconnect and reconnect due to the static. The reconnection wakes it up.
I don't know. Manually {dis,re}connecting the cable doesn't wake the PC up, but it's too hard to reproduce reliably to tell if having it disconnected makes a difference.
I had that with cheapo mechanical keyboard, on particularly dry office days I could hover my hand over it to make it crash and restart
This happens to me when I brush off my mousepad too fast with my palm. It will also cause my wireless headset to "reboot".
I thought it was me bumping my table. But now you have me wondering if it's charge buildup.
I find this very interesting, especially given that there is a paper from 1993 (linked in the artcile) that explains the issue, but it is still happening - and maybe nowadays even more than ever?
The sound card on my windows computer dies if i turn the desk fan i have off! I should try it
I freaking hate my Ikea chair. Thing shocks me every time I get up from it and then touch it.
Sounds like very cheap monitor which had lot of cost cutting done on side of protections of inputs.
I would not be surprised that touching such monitor will electrocute you.
Shorten the display cable.