I have some automated pet stuff in my house. There were 2 power outages 2 days in a row. After each one, the pet electronics refused to turn back on even if I unpluged and replugged the power brick from the wall outlet side. They would only turn on if I unplugged the power brick on the electronics side and plugged it back in.
This is kind of a pain because of the cat stuff we own is a litter robot and where it’s placed is really tight. It’s a huge hassle to access the back side of it to unplug the power brick.
So my question is, why does this happen and are there any workarounds so I don’t need to unplug the power brick when it happens?
Could also be the exact opposite (experienced this with consumer grade electronics based on microcontrollers often enough):
Because of the large capacitors, voltage from the power brick kinda “ramps up” when it is plugged into the wall. The device/its MCU/most specifically its clock circuit however prefers a hard edge of power being turned on, to reliably trigger its power on reset circuit/oscillator.
You can think of it similar to a pendulum/newton’s cradle/metronome - they also prefer one decisive push to get going reliably.
Unplugging the brick for a longer time is still worth a try, but it could also be this.