Cross-wired 12v onto a 5v bus, very expensive

[Evaluator]

I separate devices in projects according to their input voltage and put them on a 5v, 12v, 24v, or 48v bus. Whatever energy storage system I'm using, there's always a 5v bus to power Raspberry Pi 3/4/5, Orange Pi 5+, SDR's, and a gigabit ethernet switch in many cases. Cross connecting 12v onto the 5v bus once destroyed a switch, one Raspberry Pi 4, one Orange Pi 5+ with a Coral tpu, and a small Nano Pi that was running OpenWRT and functioning as a WiFi bridge. There was no smoke, amazingly, but there was a smell of burnt PCB. I ordered replacements from Amazon within an hour and was back to building 72 hours later.

 

[robbob2112]

Ouch

Time to break out your voltages busses into separate connector types or very clear labels ... and we have ALL done something silly at one point or another ...