Power Dock burned up
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I had a Omega2+ running on a Power Dock. During a period of high wind, the power in my house went off briefly 5 or 6 times. This resulted in the Power Dock frying itself and putting a burn mark in the wood table top on which it was sitting. The power was supplied on the USB by a switching supply rated for input between 100 and 240 V. The device on the Power Dock that burned is the battery management chip near the four white LEDs. The Omega survived. I don't have a question on this. I just wanted to make everyone aware that this can happen.
On a related note, I had noticed previously that the Omega would sometimes stop running when power was supplied to the Power Dock on the USB connector while the Omega was running on battery power. I didn't do a lot of investigation of this but the common fact between that behavior and the burning up that I experienced is applying 5 V power when running on the battery. Has anyone else had problems switching back and forth between battery power and 5 V USB power?
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@Robert-Jensen I've had some fun along similar lines, which you can read about here: omega2 losing power/powering off unexpectedly.
I swapped out my broken PD/2 for a replacement I had on hand and have had it powered with a 2A charger for a few weeks now and haven't noticed a repeat of my powering off problem as of yet. I haven't diagnosed the broken PD/2 to isolate what exactly burnt out either and may not unless it either happens again, or I suddenly acquire a generous amount of free time.
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my experience with consumer electronics of almost any kind need to have a spike/surge protector on any mains power source. if you had such protection i would be surprised by what happened, if no protection then not surprised so much.what happened is not so much an omega2 fault, rather it was the weakest link on that particular line. this is why some people unplug most electronics during bad weather, even if equipment is supposedly protected.
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OK, but these things are marketed for internet-of-things. For that, I imagine them to be embedded into a range of devices distributed around the house. Distributing surge protectors seems unattractive. The $15 power dock is probably not worth protecting with a surge protector. What concerned me more was that the device didn't just get bricked. It got hot enough to burn into a wood table top. If there is a fire hazard, then the failure impact is much greater than the replacement cost.
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Internet of Things (IoT) is a romantic marketing term created in recent 2-3 years.
There is no criteria nor standards on the IoTs. Some will rebrand a product existed for many years (way before IoT days)
as IoT to "catch the wave".
However, what I can say is lots of IoTs are cheap and sub-standard in many ways.
Cheap and quality go opposite ways.
