The four control “buttons” on the SmartHeart kitchen scale are copper-foil tabs that sense the presence of your finger though about 5 mm of white plastic and glass.
The main failure mode seemed to come from the microcontroller locking up and refusing to recognize any of the buttons, most annoyingly the On/Tare button, while continuing to measure whatever weight was on the scale with whatever zero point it chose. Recovery involved waiting until the thing timed out and shut itself off.
Check out how certain functions were disabled and some tweaked in the post here.
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