Looking for help at the net

Gotta love Analog Devices. They make absolutely great chips, such as nice ADuM4160 USB isolator. This chip offers full isolation for USB bus, completely separating electronics on your PCB from PC controlling it and preventing that magic smoke from escaping due to serious voltage differences between the two devices, and this without having to use secondary power source on PCB (granted, in case of USB this is of a lesser deal, but for buses like RS485, not having to build isolated power supply for is a big deal - and there's chip for that too.)  But the thing is, this chip - and many others AD makes - aren't cheap. This one was around 10€ a piece in low quantities, if my memory serves. But then again, if your industrial PCB costs something hundreds of euros, taking precautions against stupid users might be worth it. That's who the main customers for this chip - and others like it - are.

That being said, I was testing this chip in case I need it one day, and found out that when using it, USB wasn't working properly. It tried to, but failed to establish connection. Hmm. Curious, as I thought I had followed documents to the letter when designing test board. And since AD hadn't bothered to even include an example schematic in their datasheets (why?!?), I fired up google image search with "ADum4160 schematic".

And oh boy, I don't envy anyone trying to get their circuit working based on those schematics. There are functional ones there, sure, but some work only in specific cases, some of them are completely wrong, and quite a few subtly wrong so that it may work - or not. Like this add-on board (that I shall not name here) that doesn't have any bypass caps for ADuM anywhere on the board. If that one works with any reliability, it'll be due to pure miracle.

Anyway, I managed to get my ADuM working eventually - small issue with supply rails that I didn't notice when initially reading datasheet, going to "specific case" mentioned above, found out by examining some schematics and then doing some very careful reading of datasheet - but damn if I had to rely on internet with things like this more often, I'd be in a real trouble.

So, go on and search the net for information. But be wary of any information supplied - it might be wrong. And yes, that includes stuff I write here, too.