Smoking pots

[Dylan]

Uhh...not that pot. I just had a 500K pot hooked up with alligator clips and all of a sudden it was smoking. What the butt does that mean!? Obviously I'm not hooking that one up again, but I'm curious to why it happened.

[Gordonjcp]

You put too much current through it.  When it's at the low resistance end of its scale, you can actually stick quite a high current through it.  They're really only designed to deal with a few tens of milliamps at most (unless they're hefty great wirewounds).

This is why using a variable resistor for a voltage drop crash is a stupid idea, and you should use a proper adjustable regulator circuit ;-)