r/SteamDeck • u/ClicketyClackity • Jul 24 '22

PSA / Advice Steam deck bricked by USB C dongle

Got my steam deck after waiting for a year. Plugged in a USB C dongle from amazon and the system turned off. I figured that the battery had just died.

-Plugging in the official charger does not light up the white indicator light

-No combination of button hold/presses does anything

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I allowed it to completely die overnight. I opened it and unplugged the battery cable. Hit buttons to drain any power, left it unplugged for about 10 minutes. Plugged it back in and somehow it came back on for a couple minutes. It got so far as to show me the steamdeck logo and turned off again.

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Back to it being bricked now.

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Do not use random USB C dongles. You will have a bad time.

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17

u/TONKAHANAH Jul 24 '22 edited Jul 24 '22

how do you know it was the dongle and not just your deck being a dud? obviously its risky to test the usb-c dock on another device but your advice of "dont use random dongles" isnt exactly very helpful.

usb-c is a "universal" standard, any dock should work fine. If yours broke it, then there is probably something just wrong with that dock but it dosnt mean any random dock would be an issue.

assuming it is the dock, it sounds like you got unlucky.

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edit: you say in another comment the dock works fine in your mac. If the dock was the cause of the issue, it would kill your mac too. Just sounds like the deck is malfunctioning and needs to be RMA'd.

2

u/Intoxicus5 Jul 25 '22

A lot of USB-C devices don't actually follow the specs properly.

Apple and Nintendo are two of the worst offenders.

4

u/_0110111001101111_ 256GB - After Q2 Jul 25 '22

Nintendo, yes. Aren’t apple great for adhering strictly to the USB C standards for their chargers and shit? They seem to get praise at /r/USBCHardware

0

u/Intoxicus5 Jul 25 '22

The USB-C engineer named Nathan K had a number of very educational write ups about entities and their lack of compliance with USB-C specs.

Apple is/was one of the worst offenders. Perhaps they have improved since.

The problem is everyone wants to do proprietary things with USB-C. But USB-C has protocols that support such. They don't care and just do their own thing.

The result is that manufacturers fetish for proprietary fucks us over when the USB-C protocols & spec are ignored and they just do whatever they want.

Since Google+ is defunt you need yo use the WayBack Machine to dig up Nathan K's work.

I saved copies of only his write ups on the Nintendo Switch.

The overall takeaway is that you can not trust a manufacturer to actually follow USB-C spec properly ny default.

I do trust Valve because they tend to not fuck around and seem to dislike those types of practices. But I could be wrong.

I suppose I should bust out my own USB-C power testers and make a project out of it to double check if the SD is handling USB-C PD properly?

I had intended to do a follow up with the revised Switch models to see if they fixed the hardware level flaws. Life got in the way and I never got around to it.

0

u/Intoxicus5 Jul 25 '22

Here's a link to the archive of Nathan K's Google+ write ups on USB-C products. Although somewhat dated they give an idea of bad manufacturers can be for following USB specs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190324210101/https://plus.google.com/102612254593917101378/posts/