Loose magnets inside can short the battery and other components



  • Hi,
    the screen of my M5StickC suddenly stopped working, so I continued my project on another one and placed the two close to each other. Then I noticed a strange noise from the faulty one when it was moved around the good one, but it was silent when I tried to shake it a bit. After taking out the screws and removing the top, I found two small magnets inside. One of them was in contact with the circuit, very close to the LiPo battery solder points.

    Since I could not remove the main panel without taking the risk of breaking it, it was hard to remove the magnets with tweezers but they were not attached firmly to the housing. After the removal, the AXP chip was still in a "confused" state (see "Screen stopped working, nonsense AXP data" topic), but charged the battery, then turning it off and on again suddenly turned on the screen, and the unit started to work correctly.

    There is no insulation on the magnets or between magnets and the circuits, so they chould have caused more damage. There are only a few mentions of the inbuilt magnets of the M5StickC on the net, but nothing in the official documentation. BTW the weight was reduced from 15g to 13g.

    I took some photos, they can be viewed here: https://ibb.co/album/fTxsJv



  • Found more pictures of the inside after searching for magnet issues:

    https://github.com/aenertia/m5stick-scope-ecg