Raspberry pi 5 bricked for no reason

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Working on a project on my 2-month old RaspberryP i5, worked fine so far. Been connecting different devices to the GPIO pins for the first time today and BOOM it just goes dark. No warning, no red light. Tried unplugging and plugging back in, tried using different power supplies, and to to avail.

Please let me know if there are any potential fixes or if it is totally bricked, and how to prevent this in the future.

Thank you

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Start at the beginning - is the power supply still supplying 5V to the socket? If so, is there 5V available at the 5V pins on the header (eg 2)? Is there 3.3V available at the 3.3V pin headers (eg 1).

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Hi David
Welcome
Heed Jeffs suggestions. Start at the beginning from the ground up. The power supplies and distribution. A lot of problems start here.

There is always a reason for this sort of thing. Think very carefully. What exactly did you connect when this “Boom” happened. Go back over everything you added or changed. You could have got 5V onto a GPIO pin but I am not sure what would be the result here, just destroy that IO or the whole thing. Taking out things like the 3.3V regulator would effectively stop everything I think.

Be very careful. If going into unknown territory note everything down on paper. Might seem a bit inconvenient at the time but when something like this happens such notes can be invaluable.

Don’t even think about fuses. The electronics will be destroyed long before a fuse will fail. If concerned some sort of current limiting might help. Even the common incandescent lamp globe. This will have a low resistance when cold but rapidly rise as the filament heats. Or use a current limiting power supply might help save most of the bits. Although the device in use might need to fall to make the current increase
Cheers Bob

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Hi @David296658

Welcome to the forum!

Generally speaking when we see a Pi that is bricked it will be caused by the PMIC failing. The easiest way to determine if this is the case is to get a voltage reading from the 5V and 3.3V pins, they should read at ~5.1V and 3.3V, anything that is more or less than 0.2V above or below these values would be considered a critical failure.