sorry, don't matter what color the wires are.
the fault rests squarely with the GM engineers.
da Pie is clearly designed to be a Bionx fighter, to grab some market share from Bionx that seems to have inherited it entirely to itself by default.
that market is the noob/first time buyer or simply anyone non-tech inclined that wants a no-brain DIY quickie add-on for their bike with minimum of headache.
while it's impossible to make anything
totally fool-proof cuz there's always
someone that'll be up to the challenge, a fail-safe, fool-proof power connection is so basic it should have been designed in as a matter of course, but especially when you consider the the type of audience it's aimed at.
if it were me, even if the wire colors were correct, i would've tried plugging it in backwards anyways just to see if it was possible & what kind of outcome to expect as a test of the design engineer's salt.
it's all about:
Defensive Engineering
When I was a little girl, I got a pocket multimeter for xmas. It was nothing special, just a 3 digit autoranging DVM from Radio Shack. I used it for everything. And as it would happen, eventually, the button cells that powered it wore out.
So I got some new cells, and replaced them. Unfortunately for me, button cells have a different polarity than larger cells, and I ended up installing them backwards (recall that I was about 8 at the time). The meter quickly drained the batteries and self-destructed.
Now, if I had been an adult at the time, I would have been annoyed, and gone and got a new meter. Instead, I was an 8-year-old in a lower-middle-class family which could not afford (or simply did not care to) replace it. So naturally, it was a traumatic experience.
Now, if the designer of that multimeter had been willing to use a single MOSFET for reverse-protection, none of this would have happened.
The moral of the story is that, no matter what you design, no matter who you think your target audience is, every time you leave out a protection circuit, you traumatize an 8-year-old.
So how do you prevent this from happening? The answer is defensive engineering. Think of how someone could mess up, and plan for it. Expect power to be delivered backwards. Expect the regulation of your external wall wart to fail. Expect someone to plug a phone line or an ethernet drop, or both, into any RJ11 or RJ45. Expect your 110V power supply to end up in europe and plugged into 220V. Expect ESD events on your serial lines. Expect ground loops. Expect your ports to have miswired connectors attached which short your output pins together.
And remember these simple rules:
1. Absorb any failed conditions and keep working.
2. If you can't keep working, then ignore the failed condition.
3. If you can't ignore it, fail non-destructively.
4. If you can't fail non-destructively, absorb the damage in sacrificial components.
