Microwave Oven Failure: Spontaneously turned on by its LED display (2024)

My guess is the LED's suffer reverse bias thermal runaway when they're hot from being in a steamy enclosure and then they get a reverse 5v across them and any leakage current turns into heat accelerating the process.

This is literally evidence of stuff being designed to fail. An extra diode costs less than a cent at production scale. This was a manufacturing choice, not an error.

You can do an awful lot to make a device like a microwave safe with loads of failsafes...

But rarely do those failsafes protect reliably against 'the mainboard was splashed with salt water'.

Even with triple redundant relays, how do you know the salt water didn't just wet them all?

More proof blue LEDs are the devil and should have never been put into all of our electronics to be the shining beacon of "OW MY EYES" at 2 AM.

168 points and 116 comments at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41480038

Very impressive engineering on the door switches. On the display, not so much.