Oculus Quest 2 melting charge port UPDATE!

[Rysters Tech]

 

Situation Update, we did a RMA with Meta and they sent us a refurbished unit and it works great, i got a new charging block from them as well and the experience was great with the RMA person on the phone, actually somewhat knowledgeable person, didnt try any BS to get me to give up or anything like that. 

my brother has an oculus quest 2, it was purchased in december 2021 and about a month ago he told me it wasnt charging, so i looked at it and noticed the connection in the charge port seemed very loose. I took my phones macro lens and took close up photos of the charging port and noticed a burned/melted appearence, ive included those photos here as well.  I reached out to Meta for an RMA (which is not trivial) and sent them the rather jarring photos of the melting USB-C charge port.

[bmx6454]

what does the cable look like, melted as well? curious, was it with the included cable, or some cheap one?

[Rysters Tech]

3 minutes ago, bmx6454 said:

what does the cable look like, melted as well? curious, was it with the included cable, or some cheap one?

the cable looks brand new. it has used both the included charger and a high-quality aftermarket charger that strangely has the USB-C cable hardwired in it, it has the brand Vilros on it and outputs 5V 2A, this charger is apparently included with Raspberry Pi 4 kits from Vilros, which is a well-known seller of those kits, although unless you are an SBC enthusiast, you may not have heard of them. Both the official charger and the Vilros one are standard USB-C chargers in reality and both charged my A52 5G smartphone with no issues.

[OhioYJ]

The Quest is expecting a 5V @ 3A or 9V @ 2A during quick charge, I'm wondering if this has something to do with the lack of (proper) resistors to tell the Quest what type of "charger" is hooked to it and what is safe to draw or not to draw. Similar to how you need to make sure a USB C to A cable has a 56k resistor in it to be in spec so it's not a fire starter.

 

Not 100% on this, but worth looking into, Perhaps start here. When you get a replacement, I would suggest an actual charger or phone charger as a test, and not a "pi power supply". There is a possibility this could have been an issue.

[Levent]

It probably has a short on the connector. If it was able to melt it, I would assume it is VCC short to ground. This goes without saying, don't use the VR headset like that, especially don't attempt to charge it.

[Rysters Tech]

17 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

The Quest is expecting a 5V @ 3A or 9V @ 2A during quick charge, I'm wondering if this has something to do with the lack of (proper) resistors to tell the Quest what type of "charger" is hooked to it and what is safe to draw or not to draw. Similar to how you need to make sure a USB C to A cable has a 56k resistor in it to be in spec so it's not a fire starter.

 

Not 100% on this, but worth looking into, Perhaps start here. When you get a replacement, I would suggest an actual charger or phone charger as a test, and not a "pi power supply". There is a possibility this could have been an issue.

 

The pi power supply is really no different than a normal phone charger only it can provide more amps if needed, but if that were the case the power supply itself would have likely blown up if this were an overcurrent condition. The pi power supply does have the proper resistors to indicate its capabilities to the host as the pi4 requires this before it allows itself to draw more power, if you hook the pi up to a lower amperage power source such as a standard phone charger or a battery bank, it will throttle to stay within the limits of whatever power source is there. A USB-C  device doesn't blindly draw power without checking that the supply can handle it. This is how laptops can draw much higher wattages and voltages over USB-C than say, a phone would, the laptop and charger ensure everyone is on the same page before charging.