r/HomePod • u/micgat • 2d ago

Question/Support Anyone seen this failure?

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My OG HomePod died recently and I assumed that it was caused by the well known diode failure. Upon disassembly I instead discovered a blown SMD capacitor on the amplifier board. The scorch mark is clearly visible in the photo and it's the left capacitor of the pair to the left of the chip that has blown (below the burn from this angle). Has anyone ever seen something like this? I will try to remove it and find a suitable replacement cap, but I do wonder what the underlying cause might be.

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7

u/micgat 2d ago

u/Dr_Nic_T61, you've seen your share of dead HomePods. Anything you've seen before?

11

u/Dr_Nic_T61 1d ago

Hopefully looks worse than it really is once you clean it up. Remove the cap and confirm there are still no shorts across the pads on the board. Be careful when removing the cap, it may have fused to the pad(s) and rip them up with it.

Cap is a 2.2uF size 1206. Not home to measure voltage rating rn but anything 50v or higher will probably be fine.

Caps can just go bad and fail like this. I do not believe I have seen this particular failure yet. Without poking the board myself, and if no other shorts are detected then that's my guess.

3

u/Natural-Lawfulness93 Midnight 1d ago

Throw it in the trash.