Would it or could it be possible to find a "clear" heat shrink sleeve to encase the BUB board from shorting out and static electricity?
The end user would just slip the "clear heat shrink" tubing over the BUB after his configuration.
the question is what to do about the logic select header. If you cut around that it could work.
I hadn't thought of providing this with the kits but I could look into seeing how much it would be. The problem with that kind of heatshrink is that you have to buy a bit of it to get a decent price. This is the kind of stuff that builders keep their eyes open for on the surplus market. I'll check at digikey to see what it would cost.
I really wouldn't sweat about esd once the chips are mounted down on a board. I'm just not that careful about this but damage from it isn't always dead obvious either. You just want it to look slicker? Or do you have a metal desktop you work on and worried about shorts? Not that great an idea BTW (working on metal).
The only thing I absolutely know that I killed once, was a pin on a PIC chip. I walked across the room in the winter, and started to look at a student's board, which was hooked up to a desktop computer (with a ground). There was a spark from my index finger to the board and one of the pins never worked again.
For my widget boards, I put overlapping pieces of black electrical tape on the bottoms of the PCB to minimize shorts.
For all the board I design, I use grounded pushbuttons. These pushbuttons have a metal case which are attacked to 1 or 2 pins that you connect to ground. It is worth the extra price since the alternate is dead IC chips.
I checked on the heatshrink option, and it's not prohibitively expensive. I just need a persistent nag now, to get it high enough on my agenda to get it done.