EnvTail hardware issue

Hardware
1

Hi,

I’ve been working with the electric imp and the EnvTail for a while now and never faced any hardware issues till yesterday, when I connected it to my laptop through the USB cable which also not the first time of course.

The device had a code on it that has been running perfectly for days. On the laptop side, I only had the electric imp device and a mouse hooked up there. I wanted to run an updated version of the code on it but before I was able to do that and just after I hooked the device I got an error reading the temperature and got “USB hub power exceeded” error message on my screen (Windows 7).

The device itself (the April and the imp) are working perfectly. The tail’s led is working but heats up quickly and the doesn’t read the temperature anymore.

Please advise with what could have happened.
Thanks.

2

Sounds like the tail may have been connected incorrectly at some point, or the exposed PCB touched some other voltage or wire, causing overvoltage on at least one of the chips and hence frying them?

3

It didn’t exposed wires around it and it was connected as normal.

4

Power exceeded is generally from a short; the overvoltage would likely have happened right at the time the message appeared.

There’s really no way that a device would just implode like that without external influences, especially if the april and imp are working (which means the 3.3v power is ok).