Feather Huzzah fried after supplying 5V into USB?

Other Hardware General Electronics
1

I tried supplying 5V to the Feather Huzzah 8266 using this USB terminal block and the feather immediately started smoking. After that, the feather is unresponsive. I think it's fried.

I wired 5V from my variable power supply into E, or V+,
And GND from my supply into A, or GND.

Did I do something wrong? Why did this fry the board? The tutorial for the Huzzah seems to state that I can power the device with 5V into USB:

  • If you have a higher voltage power supply, use a 5V buck converter and wire it to a USB cable's 5V and GND input

I was simulating this with a variable power supply but my next step was to use a 5V buck converter to convert a 7.4V battery into 5V and supply that into USB.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

2

That makes sense because that is exactly what a USB lead does. Assuming, of course, that you connect the power to the correct terminals

3

At this point, I'm 100% sure the terminal wiring is reversed in the product description. Having tried my Feather Huzzah, I tried reversing the A/E pins and plugging it into another Feather. That powered up and is working perfectly.

Now, I have +5V into what's labeled " A – Pin 5 (GND)" and GND into what's labeled " E – Pin 1 (V+)". I've confirmed this with a multimeter.

Really frustrating I had to sacrifice a ~$20 Huzzah for this. I might grab one of the female USB blocks to verify my other male blocks aren't reversed as well. It's hard to get the leads into the USB Micro port to test.

4

Also I was finally after to get my multimeter in there: the pin labeled "E – Pin 1 (V+)" is clearly connected to Pin 5, not Pin 1, in the USB connector, which is reversed from the official spec. The product description is definitely wrong.

5

If you bought the terminal from Adafruit, definitely contact their customer service about it. They treated me very well the couple of times I dealt with them.

7

Hi
This is the ESP8266 HUZZAH, in the picture can you tell where you connected your power supply?
"I plugged 5V from my variable power supply into E, or V+,"

ESP8266_HUZZAH
ESP8266_HUZZAH822×372 161 KB

8

The page you´ve supplied takes to this type (male)
image

but

There is also this type (female - another USB terminal block), where the connections are the opposite:

image

If you get the first, ok, tell Adafruit. But if you have the second, better keep it to yourself, and well, these things happens... :man_shrugging: