Warning: Rainbow easter egg on charge port may be harmful to your EVSE

[FlasherZ]

Today my HPWC, a trusty device delivering for 3 1/2 years, decided to give up the ghost. It's a failure of the main board.

Over the past week, as evidenced by my app's notifications on my phone, my kids have enjoyed playing with the rainbow charge-port easter egg about 20 times.

I recommend not exercising this easter egg repeatedly, it may have had something to do with my HPWC failure. While correlation does not imply causation, it's probably not good for the EVSE.

I also noted it here:
HPWC failure

 

[JohnSnowNW]

How could these two things possibly be connected?

No snark intended.

 

[FlasherZ]

To make the rainbow charger easter egg work, you have to click the charger button 10 times. If the car has already started charging, it causes the contactors in the HPWC or UMC to disengage and re-engage repeatedly, and exercises the proximity circuits repeatedly as well.

In my case the main board of HPWC failed. As I note, correlation doesn't imply causation, but in an abundance of caution, I'd avoid over-exercising the rainbow charging easter egg.

 

[Electric700]

Oh no! The easter egg is nice, but I think they can switch to another way to activate it, such as through the use of the center console.

 

[FlasherZ]

Over in this thread here...
Effects of charging on home service voltage
...I talk about how I discovered my voltage has been running a bit high over the past couple of weeks (since a storm). This may be a contributing factor to the HPWC's failure as well, or it could be a combination of the two -- easter egg frequent disconnects and high-voltage stress. I won't be able to gather any more details, as Tesla now has the original HPWC for any failure analysis they want to do.

 

[aesculus]

To make the rainbow charger easter egg work, you have to click the charger button 10 times.

Someone else stated you could just hold the button down for more than 10 seconds but it did not work for me.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Given all the bugs in the Model X and all the features people have been clamoring for on both cars (like a better functioning nav), surely Tesla engineers have better use of their time?

 

[JenniferQ]

I have not been able to get that particular EE to work, but as my car charges from 3am+ I don't think I'm missing much anyway...