Ikea sells goods that are in some cases cheap, but you would think if they would design some low-power electronics they would make mistakes that could burn down your house. Actually, this almost happened with the Ikea TRÅDFRI Gateway.
The device was running for just a year in my new house and I was actually quite happy with the stability and simplicity of how they built it. Today, it stopped working and I wanted to understand why again an Ikea gateway would fail on me. I believe that electronics can die for some reason but twice is in my option a bit suspicious.
I opened up the Ikea housing using a screwdriver and apply some force. It had the smell of electronics that is burned. Then I screw the PCB out of the enclosure and saw one of the chips was clearly different.
In the following image it’s clear that this is not how it should look.
The images show a clear breaking-line on the chip that made some electrical short of heat source killing it chip more! There was an enormous heat generated, seeing from the different colours the chip had.