Voice Preview burned after some time using it

Hardware
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1

Hello,

I got a Home Assistant Voice Preview, and after some days it just stopped working. I just opened it and the speaker plastic is melted with a hole and one component is burned too.

IMG_20250312_161857 copy
IMG_20250312_161857 copy1920×1080 223 KB

What could have happened to cause the component to burn and get hot enough to melt the plastic of the speaker?

What component is this ?

Thanks!

2

Hi @OnlyForIoT,

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

Unfortunately, from here, I can only speculate as to what caused this to happen. The ICs visible in the picture are both parts of the device’s voltage converters (to reduce the 5 volts from USB to lower voltages for the processors). These could overheat/fail if the power fed into the device was not appropriate, additional loads were connected to it or if something elsewhere (internal or external) malfunctioned. That said, even if any of these things happened, I would expect the devices to shut down before becoming quite so hot, but failures can happen in strange ways – this is where materials science comes into play. All materials are flame-retardant and won’t ignite even when subject to extreme heat; however, they can (and will) deform, which is what we are seeing here. Do rest assured, while visually this looks bad, there is no chance of fire.

That said, we’d like to get as much information from you as possible to help us further understand, investigate and diagnose this failure:

  • 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?
  • Was the device in use (playing audio of any sort) at the moment you noticed the failure? If so, for approximately how long (seconds, minutes, hours, etc.)?
  • 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 this is the first we’ve seen of a failure like this.

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

Thanks,

Keith

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