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.
![top](/img/ikea/ikea1.png)
![side](/img/ikea/ikea2.png)
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.