Guy at the Columbus meetup showed me his burnt PCB and said 'it worked fine for a year'
Found out he'd been running a 5V LED strip off his keyboard's USB port at 900mA for 12 months straight, and the trace finally gave up mid-typing session. Check what your board can actually push before you plug anything extra in, has anyone else cooked a controller this way?
Ngl I did almost the exact same thing with a little USB desk fan, ran it off my board for months like it was no big deal. One day the port just died and took two others down with it, so now I'm the proud owner of a keyboard where half the USB holes are just decorations. The thing is those ports usually only give you like 500mA, sometimes less, and people treat them like a free wall outlet. A year of pushing 900 through a trace that thin is honestly kind of impressive, dude got his money's worth before the magic smoke came out. Lesson learned the hard way for both of us I guess.