A valuable lesson that should be considered is, if your project involves working with many components or devices that are un-covered, then careful examination of these components should be taken before applying power to them. This may seem obvious at first, but when pressured with a timeline and working with so many components, a quick check before powering on, might end up setting you back.
In our case, the CODEC shown in the picture below, had a tiny strand of wire, most likely just debris, was found lying across the power and ground pins causeing a short and frying the IC. Luckily, our lesson only set us back one component and a quick soldering job.
Fried CODEC: [1]
Since this component is a "Surface-Mount Device" or SMD, these IC's typically have very tiny pins, where even a slightly bent pin can cause a short-circuit and can be easily over looked with how tiny they are, if they are not carefully examined first. This could easily be a major issue if something like this where to happen near the end of a project, potentially causing damge to the whole device, or even a single component that is expensive and hard to get and/or has long delivery times.
To prevent this from happening in the future we now take an extra minute to examine our components before powering on. A small magnifying glass can save some time when examining tiny components and are highly recommended. Our team was lucky that this happened when it did and was a valuable lesson learned.
[1] Cirrus Logic, “24-Bit, 192 kHz Stereo Audio CODEC,” CS4271 datasheet, August
2005