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Oops - someone nearly caused a fire with the Steam Controller Puck
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this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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This is a very solved problem I have no idea why the Steam controller would have an issue with it other than laziness or oversight. Don't supply voltage and current on exposed pins until you've validated that thing you're expecting to deliver voltage and current to is actually there and correctly connected. This is the whole reason the third pin usually even exists, for data/sense purposes. Add a fourth pin if you have to. It's not rocket science.
This def feels like a fuck up on valves part. Sad in a $100 controller.
I love valves hardware so makes me sad to see. No one is perfect but still... They have the money to do this right, and this one seems pretty straight forward and well known.
Plus the puck attaches magnetically, which means you could even detect it using a hall sensor if you just wanted to use 2 pins for whatever reason.
Definitely that, but also, are those pins not recessed or guarded?? That seems like really poor engineering. There could have been some kind of physical keying between the charger and the controller to prevent other metallic items from inadvertently bridging the contacts.
This only happened because of a charging smartwatch. You can't short it with just any metal contacting them. The watch burnt out the puck.
It is entirely avoidable from a design perspective, but it's not just like any metal will do anything.