Brand new Voice PE hardware failure

lucaberta · May 4, 2025, 12:01pm

Hello all,

first message on this forum, now that I have decided to dip the toes a lot deeper into HA, given the Voice PE product and the multilanguage support that I really need at home.

I have received a Voice PE last week, and have configured it this morning. It wasn’t completely configured, as I was still getting an error message on the iPhone app, but the device was definitely online, I saw it upgraded its firmware, it was visible in HA, and would reply to the wake word though it never produced a voice output, just the chime message.

I told myself “I will troubleshoot this later” and went for a walk with the dog… when I got back, I noticed that the Voice PE was apparently dead, and I could not wake it nor change the volume with the dial.

I tried to reboot it by disconnecting and reconnecting it, but no luck.

I then tried to power it up in another room, with another USB power supply, and that’s when I smelled the typical burnt smell which I sadly have smelled oh so many times during my many years in electronics…

The smell was stronger closer to the grove port, probably because of the slots to break the plastics, and when I opened the device it was all too clear what created the magic smoke, the little IC located between the USB-C and the audio jack:

I now wonder what’s next with my DOA Voice PE:

do I get a replacement unit since I had literally just bough it?
if yes, how do proceed with an RMA?
do I send the broken unit back for a root cause analysis, or this kind of failure is easy to track?
what could have caused the failure?

Consider that the USB power supply I use is very reliable and I have used it for at least a year without issues.

Same is true for the cable, a USB-A to USB-C which I used many times to recharge batteries of solar lanterns which have a 18650 Li-ion battery in them. I am not sure if the cable has data lines, but that shouldn’t matter, should it?

Happy to help to improve user onboarding, but now I want a working Voice PE device all the more!

Any hints for me?

Thanks, Luca

kbx81 · May 5, 2025, 7:14pm

Hi Luca,

To start, I’d like to apologize for this. We’ll be happy to work with your vendor to replace your device.

Unfortunately, from here, I can only speculate as to what caused this to happen; failures such as this are most typically caused by bad power and/or ESD. I realize your power supply may be reputable but they can and do still fail, sometimes in strange ways. Some power supplies also don’t correctly implement PD and they may introduce a brief spike in voltage when first powered on/connected. This can be harmful to some devices; they may not fail the first time but after a few “strikes” they give in and this can be the result. Admittedly I can’t say that this is the cause of the failure here but it’s a generally well-known issue and something to be aware of. Put another way, (unfortunately) in the world of USB-C, a power supply that works reliably with one device is not guaranteed to work reliably with anything-and-everything.

In any event, it would be helpful to know:

What specifically were you using to power the device? Would you mind sharing some pictures of the power supply and any cables you were using?
Had you connected any additional hardware to the VPE? For example, via the Grove port or internal (GPIO) headers.
Had you opened the device and/or made any modifications to it prior to this happening?

Please do not interpret any of these questions as (an) accusation(s) – we’d just like to know what (if any) modifications may have been made/what peripherals were connected as it can be helpful to understand a failure like this.

Again, we apologize for this situation and hope we can work with you to better understand what happened and make it right.

Thanks,

Keith

lucaberta · May 6, 2025, 5:38pm

Hi Keith,

here is the information you requested.

here is the power supply:

and here it is again together with the simple USB-A to USB-C cable I used:

nope. I had just barely configured it, and when I returned after configuring it, it was already dead.

Later my wife told me that she smelled something but did not pay much attention.

nope. I did it after, when I was typing the message you replied to, since I watched the Voice PE presentation event and remembered that it was easy to open. And indeed it was, and that’s when I found the smoked IC!

I have already contacted the local vendor and I will post the broken unit back to him, and he will provide a new one.

I would definitely like to avoid frying it again, but if you say that USB-C is such a poor standard for powering devices, I am really missing the easy times of USB-A now…

I will try to power up the new unit from another USB power adapter, but how do I know if it’s going to smoke the new unit or not, I wonder…

Many thanks,

Luca

kbx81 · May 6, 2025, 6:39pm

Thank you for sharing this information!

In terms of USB-C, power delivery is much more complex than it was with prior iterations of USB. While I believe the standard itself is very clear, some power supplies (and devices, for that matter) don’t implement it quite right. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean they won’t work, it just means they are more likely to…create issues such as this. It’s kind of crazy, but yes, there are indeed people frying devices equipped with USB-C ports with USB-C power supplies that don’t quite function exactly right.

In terms of your specific situation, it appears you are using a high-power/laptop power supply. While this should (and I would argue it’s also perfectly reasonable to expect that it would) work, I might suggest using something much smaller, as the VPE typically consumes less than five watts (assuming no accessories are connected). The power supply you’re using is very, very oversized for the VPE which just allows more opportunity for things to go off the rails. If I may make an analogy, using this large power supply with the VPE is like using a fire hose to fill an eyedropper. Personally, I use an old iPhone charger (the little cube-shaped ones that are about 1"/2.5 cm cubes) to power the VPEs I have here. These are rated for up to ten watts and are only equipped to provide 5 volts, so they’re very, very safe for use with the VPE.

Regardless, we are eager to learn as much as we can about the failure. Since you’ve already arranged to return it to your vendor, you don’t mind, please DM me your vendor’s information and tracking information so we can reach out to them to obtain the failed device for research.

Thank you again and sorry for the trouble.

Keith

lucaberta · May 7, 2025, 6:48pm

Hi Keith,

this is so bizarre! I am fully aware that this USB brick was way oversized for the need, but since I decided to configure the new Voice PE at a different location inside home, that is what I had handy where I did the work.

Ultimately I would have installed the Voice PE in a different location and with a different and much smaller USB brick, but I never got to this point with this unit!

same here, I have plenty of those and others of similar kind, though I am starting to have bigger bricks with more ports to save the space needed by power strips.

sure, I will DM you the details of the vendor, I have already told them that I had opened a discussion on the forum but am not sure if they read it.

The unit has been posted today and should get to the vendor by Friday, so I expect some activity sometimes early next week.

I am so much looking forward to getting a replacement unit soon!

Many thanks,

Luca