PM5 failure caused by device holder

[Carl Watts]

Probably pretty rare but thought I would post it up to stop people killing their PM5.

I had a customer presumably make his own device holder by removing the rear battery holder screw and using a longer screw to affix it to the back of the monitor.

Well if the screw is too long it goes right through the rear plastic and straight into an electrolytic cap on the board and causes a permanent short even after the screw is removed.

The PM5 then throws a "USB Overload" error if you are on the latest firmware version and your PM5 is now stuffed.

Sent C2 an e-mail, if they ever relay the board in the next hardware version, it ideally needs a hole right there directly inline with the screw, not a capacitor because sooner or later shit happens.

[Willy.VdW]

Piercing an electrolytic capicitor is probably not very healthy either.

[Ombrax]

I suppose the questions are 1) How far do you need to go to idiot-proof your product? and 2) How likely is this to happen, and is it high enough on the list of potential issues that C2 should be willing to give up valuable circuit board real estate to address it?

I recently purchased a car windshield sunshade and at the very bottom the "instruction sheet" says "Do not drive vehicle with sunshade installed."
Do the tech writers think their customers are truly that dumb, or did the lawyers force them to add that?

[jamesg]

Usually there are "intended purpose" clauses and similar, ever since a lady won her case, having used her microwave to dry her wet dog.

[Carl Watts]

How likely is this to happen, and is it high enough on the list of potential issues that C2 should be willing to give up valuable circuit board real estate to address it?

Well as it happened this occurred on a 3rd Hardware version from 2020 and its the first one of these I have seen.

What was noted is that there is plenty of board to play with now as obviously the external flash memory IC has gone (it was a huge device) and it must now reside in the micro and because you don't need all those address and data pins on the micro, its also now pretty small as well.

No shortage of space, just shift up the caps and put a 3mm hole in the board.