As we have already seen previously, it is commonly believed that many 8501s and TEDs are killed by Electrostatic Discharge (ESD for friends) coming in through the various connector ports when trying to connect something while the machine is powered on or even when just touching them. In fact, Commodore retrofitted some diodes on many C16 boards to offer some protection against this: they were probably experiencing a lot of failures and tried to remedy that by putting 1n4148 diodes on the IEC port lines going straight to the CPU:

1n4148 diodes are not fast enough for good ESD protection though, so this workaround is probably very little effective, can we do any better?

We have already taken a step in this direction by adding buffers between the joystick ports and the TED but we can do more, and that would be exactly the same thing we did on the Rämixx500 board, i.e. adding some DT1042 ESD Suppressor Diodes which were designed exactly for this purpose. Unfortunately the DT1042 is a surface-mount (and pretty small!) device but I couldn't find any through-hole equivalent. I can promise, though, that this will be the only SMD component on the whole board! Besides, you can just skip them if you don't feel comfortable and put your confidence in the 1n4148s, for which I had already added proper footprints in V2 by the way.

The small size of the DT1042 actually helps and as each component has 4 diodes, we can put them everywhere: on the joystick ports, on the IEC port and on the Datassette port. Putting one on the A/V connector is probably not a good idea (plus you're probably going to always have something plugged in there, since we got rid of the modulator), so we'll skip that. It would probably be worth it putting some on the cartridge port but that would definitely be rather cumbersome. At least that port is recessed and hopefully this will be enough to prevent people from touching it, not to mention that plugging anything into it while the machine is powered on is never going to work anyway. The following is what I ended up with:

Don't take the second picture too literally: if you go for the DT1042s, you must not install the 1n4148s (D94-99) and vice-versa.

May the TED live long and prosper!