It’s weird issue fixing week, one of my HomePod mini’s started playing up a while back and it basically was acting like the touch sensor was always “touched”. Before that it was randomly starting music every few minutes and stopping it, which was… a little cursed.
I think it might have gotten a weird voltage spike from the house power because the AC-DC power supply on one of my Sonoff smart switches on the same power board died around the same time. It worked with UART power, but just not from the wall power.
I’d power it up, the lights would start white and then quickly go red, then it’d get into a boot/reboot loop. I tried re-flashing the firmware etc, but then someone suggested just disconnecting the touch sensor.
Turns out it works just fine like that! Following the iFixit HomePod Mini teardown guide I removed the top and disconnected the ribbon cable for the touch sensor. I powered it up, went through set up and it works fine now! I did have to put the diffuser back over the LEDs so the iPhone camera would be happy to sync with it, but I think I’m going to leave it “naked” for now because it looks very evil-cyber-eye as-is.
HomePod Mini without its lid
It looks like they didn’t clean the PCB very well from the factory, but I don’t think this led to its demise, it’s certainly not had any liquid damage - the thing’s been mounted above a door frame far from any liquids for its entire life.