Larry probably tried to power this thing from his cigarette lighter, huh?
It would probably have survived for a while on the 12 to 15 V of the auto battery instead of 9 V from the adapter. But, he probably got the polarity reversed. With the virtually unlimited current capacity of an auto battery, the microcontroller was toast before it knew what hit it. Any fuse would have been too slow to prevent terminal damage even if the circuit traces didn’t vaporize first. If Larry wants it back, no problem. It still looks like a CD player. If he takes it in for repair, the technician (while holding their nose) will even probably agree that it was a CD player at one time.
