Around these parts, we generally celebrate clever hacks that let you do more with less. So if somebody wrote in to tell us how they used multiplexing to drive the front panel of their latest gadget with fewer pins on the microcontroller than would normally be required, we’d be all over it. But what if that same hack ended up leading to a common failure in a piece of consumer hardware?

As [Jim] recently found out, that’s precisely what seems to be ailing the Meaco Arete dehumidifier. When his stopped working, some Internet searching uncovered the cause of the failure: if a segment in the cheap LED display dies and shorts out, the multiplexing scheme used to interface with the front panel essentially reads that as a stuck button and causes the microcontroller to lock up. He passed the info along to us as a cautionary tale of how over-optimization can come with a hidden cost down the line.

Judging by the thread from the Badcaps forum, the problem was identified last summer. But unless you had this particular dehumidifier and went searching for it, it’s not the kind of thing that you’d otherwise run into. The users start by going through the normal diagnostic steps, but come up short (no pun intended).

Eventually, user [CG2] resorts to buzzing out all the connections to the two digit seven-segment LED display on the front panel, and finds a dead short on one of the segments. After removing the display, the dehumidifier sprung back to life and everything worked as expected. It wasn’t hard to identify a suitable replacement display on AliExpress, and swapping it out brought the appliance back up to full functionality.

Now to be fair, a shorted out component is likely to cause havoc wherever it might be in the circuit, and as such perhaps it’s the lowest-bidder LED display with the unusually high failure rate that’s really to blame here. But it’s also more likely you’d interpret a dark display as a symptom of the problem rather than the cause, making this a particularly tricky failure to identify.

In any event, judging by how many people seem to be having the same problem, and the fact that there’s now an iFixit guide on how to replace the shorted display, it seems like this particular product was cost-optimized just a bit too far.

If you think shorting a transformer’s winding means big sparks and fried wires: think again. In this educational video, titled The Magnetic Bypass, [Sam Ben-Yaakov] flips this assumption. By cleverly tweaking a reluctance-based magnetic circuit, this hack channels flux in a way that breaks the usual rules. Using a simple free leg and a switched winding, the setup ensures that shorting the output doesn’t spike the current. For anyone who is obsessed with magnetic circuits or who just loves unexpected engineering quirks, this one is worth a closer look.

So, what’s going on under the hood? The trick lies in flux redistribution. In a typical transformer, shorting an auxiliary winding invites a surge of current. Here, most of the flux detours through a lower-reluctance path: the magnetic bypass. This reduces flux in the auxiliary leg, leaving voltage and current surprisingly low. [Sam]’s simulations in LTspice back it up: 10 V in yields a modest 6 mV out when shorted. It’s like telling flux where to go, but without complex electronics. It is a potential stepping stone for safer high-voltage applications, thanks to its inherent current-limiting nature.

The original video walks through the theory, circuit equivalences, and LTspice tests. Enjoy!