In some/most cases there is no difference.

We switched to the FT230X, which works great.

Our detailed investigation: https://stb-tester.com/blog/2016/05/26/ir-post-mortem

> The original FT232R chips have a clocking bug that makes bitbang mode unusable for many applications, with no workaround

One of the problems with this situation is that if clones are allowed to permeate the market unencumbered the manufacturer of the genuine device might not have the financial capability to address problems and continue to innovate. Every single fake chip takes revenue away from the legitimate supplier.

Not arguing that your technical point isn't valid. It is. My point is that causing damage to the legitimate manufacturer by substituting their chips with clones has a non-zero non-trivial effect. Clone chip makers have zero interest and expend zero effort, time and money supporting the ecosystem they infect. All they care about is pushing their hardware and nothing else.

This also causes damage to consumers because it is impossible to know what issues fake chips might bring to the table across a wide range of vectors, safety and reliability being just two of them.

The better path is to take design wins away from FTDI and adopt hardware from legitimate part suppliers with solutions that meet your requirements. That's fine and that's how a healthy market works. Choosing fakes over legitimate parts hurts everyone. Today it's FTDI, tomorrow it could be your own products. Having experienced the "attack of the clones" myself, I can tell you this is not pleasant at all and it can, quite literally, destroy your company, costing jobs and your future.

Not a simple problem.

But $5 doesn't feel bad for shipping to get good parts quickly from a company I trust. But your point is taken. Sucks to put a $0.30 temp sesnor and pay $5 to ship it. =)

I also keep a "gift list" for myself of things I've always meant to experiment with but haven't gotten around to ordering. I ended up playing with MSP430 controllers this way.

Links? That sounds fun...

Flip note: US companies selling to customers in the EU do require EU VAT number as well.

Overall living in the US and applying the same rules/advice to people not living there tends to be wrong.

You are looking at it precisely backwards. The key question here goes something like this:

Is Apple responsible for ensuring that fakes function correctly as it issues software updates for its own hardware?

In other words, just because someone decided to make a Hackintosh or a fake iPhone is Apple now instantly saddled with having to support this hardware for the lifetime of the fake products? And this is the case whether there's just one clone or 100 different variants?

As I have asked others, in what alternate reality does this make any sense?

My guess is that none of you have ever designed or manufactured hardware products at scale and don't fully comprehend the implications of what you so vehemently believe. No hardware manufacturer would ever take the side of having to ensure fakes work correctly; this would be sheer insanity.

> Pro-consumer would be a pop-up letting the user know they received a counterfeit devices.

This from driver code?

The party at fault here is whoever sourced the devices. If the design engineer called for FTDI and they put in FunTDI instead, well, they didn't build what they were contracted to build. Period.

Something as simple as a driver revision to, for example, improve performance, could break a fake chip. Is the legitimate manufacturer supposed to now be aware of every fake and design their drivers forever more to ensure fakes work perfectly? C'mon, that's preposterous.

If I design a board and someone decides to use a cloned version in their machine and somebody gets killed because of a software update I can assure you that the case wouldn't even get to court. The instant it is discovered that the board was a fake the entire thing would be thrown out. There is no way anyone is going to hold the manufacturer responsible for ensuring that clones work property. That is not what they are in business to do.

https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?board=111.0

* allegedly of course.

For food, you can't change the game without prior notice, but if it is clear that faked goods are toxic, people would start buying from trusted providers themselves. For electronics, I don't see a problem. If a device is bricked, go to your dealer and let him replace it. He will do the same for his supplier, etc.

Somebody in the chain will discover that his supplier is a fraud. He will have to swallow the costs, but has learned a valuable lesson.

If people have brought the product from some unstable source, then they most likely got it cheaper and they are now paying the price for the increased risk they took. It doesn't feel good but I don't think that it is unfair.

You are making the mistake of taking a hypothetical and arguing against it. These are contrived examples designed to communicate a concept rather than an absolute reality that one should argue against.

I'll just say that it is very common to see comments relating to hardware issues on HN from people who obviously don't have experience building hardware at scale. And so, it is hard to discuss these things due to the asymmetry of knowledge and experience.

Any non-trivial hardware development and manufacturing operation has or should have professional supply chain management. It is their responsibility to ensure they build product as designed by engineers. If the hardware engineer specified an FTDI chip he or she did not mean "anything that is labeled similarly to FTDI". No, they meant to design in an FTDI chip. Anything else could fail or perform differently at any time.

Blame for the bricking of devices given a change of driver code isn't with FTDI, it is with whoever manufactured the product that was supposed to use FTDI chips and did not.

Let's also mention the very real potential for someone knowingly using clone chips in order to save money.

It is preposterous to charge the chip manufacturer with this responsibility.

There could be many tentacles to this kind of an issue, but the manufacturer ensuring that their drivers only work correctly with their chips isn't anti-consumer at all, quite to the contrary.

Yet another angle: The crappy clone manufacturer --who could not care less about the consumer-- make a bad chip and it is the responsibility of the legitimate manufacturer to write the drivers and ensure it works well? In what alternate reality is that reasonable or required?

Go ask the manufacturer of the fake chip to support it with their own driver.

Really. As a hardware manufacturer, if you use a fake version of my product and demand that my software work with it you will hear the loud sound of the phone being hung up forcefully.

The legitimate manufacturer can do anything it wants with the software and their hardware. If someone wants support for fakes they can provide it themselves.

We are talking about encouraging or tolerating theft of intellectual property here. Having been the victim of this I am quite sensitive to the idea.

In professional engineering, where time is money, Digi-Key or Mouser is always more efficient, if they've got what you need. For personal stuff, where the value of your time is ~zero, the opposite can be true.

If I were working on something more important that dinking around for fun, sure, I might care a bit more about what's actually on the board. But as it is, the clones are more than adequate for my needs, particularly at their price point.

Last time I made heavy use of Digikey was in Australia and it worked really well. I'd order on Thursday and it would arrive by ~Monday, which was pretty awesome. You're right shipping, I remember correctly, was $20-$30, but on $200 of parts it was a small cost.

But as I said, this was done in my professional life, so I didn't blink an eye at it. Hobby world I get is different, but also the cost is frustration as opposed to 1000s, 10,000s of badly built boards.

First, on design. In your cited app note, Maxim explicitly denotes from the onset:

> Operating a 1-Wire network beyond the limits or disregarding advice given in this document may result in unreliable network performance.

The key operator that I see here is "beyond the limits", to which Maxim engineers appear to have done a fair job of specifying. Indeed, there's a lot of fine print in the published datasheet[1] alone on "parasite power mode", but a first pass suggests this is nothing more than a nuanced design challenge, not one of questionable reliability. If your long 1-wire network works today but not tomorrow, then it's difficult to swallow attribution of the issue to a singular authentic component constrained by documented performance specs rather than the system's overarching design.

Second, on reliability. Since practicing engineers don't have the leisure of independently validating every bit of specified electrical minutae, we generally have to extend some level of trust to what the component vendors specify in datasheets unless presented with evidence to the contrary (because bugs). I poke fun at your "works fine" remark above because it reads like what you care about is some semblance of establishing trivial, intermittent communication while handwaving the accuracy of the reported temperature measurement, especially given all the effort to demonstrate and document that the physical implementations of these counterfeits are clearly different...which renders the reference datasheet null and void in its entirety...which I therefore conclude nothing about these counterfeit sensors can be trusted in any application with meaningful skin in the game. To describe these counterfeits as "somewhat reliable" strikes me as somewhere between naively optimistic and outright delusional.

But hey, your hardware, your problems...just saying. :)

[1] https://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/DS18B20.pdf

I poke fun at the OP because his qualifier for "works fine" is an indeterminate definition of eventually establishing some semblance of compliant 1-wire communication with a counterfeit component without even so much as batting an eye to question the accuracy of the sensor measurement being read in, let alone:

  a) environmental constraints
  b) electrical constraints
  c) timing constraints
  d) system integration considerations
  e) counterfeit variance/unpredicability

For reliability, where that trade-off sits depends on the application. Aerospace, medical, consumer electronics, and disposable toys will sit in different places. If I lose a mission to Mars saving $100 on part which had a 5% chance of failure within a year, that's very poor engineering. If I include that same part in a $3 toy, bringing the price to $103, that's equally poor engineering.

Whether I trust or trust-and-verify depends on how much the "verify" part costs, how strong my trust is, and what the costs of failure are. Normally, the ROI calculation is easy; capitalist markets work well for this. I can ballpark expected costs.

When working with a customer like the government, the boundaries might be a little bit distorted, since the customer is process-oriented. The government might have a hard salary cap which makes it impossible to bring in qualified engineers, and I might take 3 years with a team of 5 people at $100k to do what one person at $300k could do in 6 months. At the same time, I might have hard requirements on process, such as origin-tracing every part.

The danger is when that becomes in-cultured and spills over to other places. If I'm working for the government, I'll follow government processes, and I understand why those are there. But I won't confuse those processes with good engineering. Once people do, they become poor engineers.

If I've shipped a toy which unwittingly has thousands of fake parts which I thought you made, we'll both have been cheated, and I'll expect you to solve that with me cooperatively. If you hack into my product and brick it, even if you were legally in the right (and you're not), you've lost a customer. That's bad business too.

What you are calling "malicious code" could --and likely is-- quality control code.

The fact that fakes fail isn't the responsibility of the legitimate manufacturer.

I don't know how many hypothetical examples I have to concoct to drive the point home.

OK, here's another one. Fake Tesla. The real Tesla writes code that bricks the entire fake car. This is 100% pro-consumer. The fake Tesla could literally kill people.

What you guys are arguing for is that Tesla should ensure that fakes are able to function. And, at the extremes, that Tesla is responsible for their proper function and safety.

Think about that for a moment.

Why was it a mistake? I've used the 'fake' ones. Did not have any problem with them.

A key point here is that it’s impossible for the malicious driver to know what representation the seller made to the consumer— the presence of a nonoriginal part doesn’t necessarily mean there was any fraud involved.

Edit to add:

> ... fake iPhones made in Switzerland sold in the US as through they were real iPhones. If that's the case, then, YES, Apple would be right to brick them with an update. Absolutely.

Only after obtaining a court order to that effect. Destroying someone else’s property without due process is generally not acceptable, regardless of how right you are. To step away from technology for a moment, is it ok for a glassmaker to go around town breaking windows because they’re allegedly made with counterfeit glass?

In that alternative reality where, for example, mobile phone carriers are required to allow 911 calls even if your account is otherwise locked because you fraudulently paid with someone else's credit card.

Digikey got it's opening when the mainline distributors decided that didn't want to deal with piddly little orders and imposed $250 minimums. Digikey swiped a bunch of their customers.

Now days ordering off Digikey is easy. But the cost of shipping is murder unless you want to wait a week plus for ground. Same time if you know what you want places like Allied will ship small orders for not much. And Jameco Electronics if they have it you can will call from their warehouse in Belmont.

Also, it is painful to wait for these packages from China. Digikey ships same day and its at your door step in the morning (I overnight it) and if you use $7, it is usually 2-3 days.

Plus, you're supporting legit businesses and not the shenzhen market.

I can understand total hobbyist who cannot afford $7 shipping often. But even then, you can bundle all your parts and order once.

Any engineer who earns a salary can afford $7 shipping. If you're a business, there is absolutely no excuse to penny pinch here. You're losing money by using unreliable parts, if not now, at some point in the future.

I do have ethical qualms about supporting/funding "stolen IP", but then I've kinda got ethical qualms about the whole concept of IP anyway, and if you wanted to go hardline on IP compliance you'd probably have to avoid everything out of China (and everything that contains components out of China)... I wonder how often Apple get counterfeit components slipping through on Foxconn production lines, and how much effort they put into stopping it beyond extensive QA - which only ensures any counterfeits that make it through need to be close-enough to functionally equivalent to pass all the tests? The "test after" approach kinda pushes towards more IP infringement rather than less, since it's likely parts built from stolen designs would pass more often that parts reimplemented according to the spec?

Would you say that they also have "the absolute right to create drivers that sabotage counterfeits of their products"?

That's a different argument. You could argue that they should have the right given that (elsewhere you have argued) their governments have abrogated their responsibility to protect their IP. And that would be an interesting and compelling argument. But it's entirely different to "[having] the absolute right to create drivers that only work with their products in order to assure quality, performance and function." - and it would be disingenuous to keep arguing that.

> the FTDI case was a case of the company intentionally shipping malicious code used to brick the clones

don't you understand? FTDI does indeed have the absolute right to create drivers that only work with their products, but to intentionally damage a third party product so that it no longer works anywhere else, including with that third party's drivers, seems egregious.

A lot of fakes were distributed through reputable sources as originals. So you could for example build a medical device using expensive original components from digikey, only to see it breaking in the hospital for no apparent reason.

I bet people have _died_ due to FTDIs actions.

I understand that. But please charge me for what it costs. Don't let people with small orders pay the price for people with large orders. They already get discount for their order size!

Or if this is not possible at least call it an order-picking fee, don't lump it in the shipping costs.

The question of who the victim is under the FTDI scenario is a really interesting one and likely one that is difficult to resolve with absolute certainty. By this I mean that the consequences of various permutations of potential and actual actions require the benefit of time in order to fully grasp. All we can do is attempt predict outcomes based on experience, knowledge of technology, markets, and, of course, the bias every human being brings to the table.

It is important to note that FTDI devices don't just exist in Windows PC's. They are part of a wide range of products covering an unimaginable range of applications. Defects in clones, therefore, can have an equally large and unknowable range of consequences.

In my case I see two scenarios.

The first is what took place: FTDI was forced to retreat, effectively allowing millions of clones to exist unencumbered and without suffering any financial or legal consequences.

On first inspection forcing FTDI to back off was a pro-consumer stance. The victim, in this line of argument, was the consumer and FTDI --to be dramatic-- was the evil greedy corporate actor wanting it all. How dare they!

It is interesting to note that in this narrative the true criminals, the counterfeiters, never seem to be characterized as the culprit, when in fact, they are. It is easy to demonstrate that the marketplace would be safer without fakes.

This, BTW, applies to any product category, not just chips. Simple example: Fake dog food that could potentially kill your dog because the producers don't really care and have no responsibility or accountability to society, whether it be legal or moral.

And yet, if you analyze this scenario, it is also easy to demonstrate that the actual long term outcome is precisely opposite to the desired outcome (protecting the consumer).

How?

By forcing a retreat at such a high level (FTDI devices are everywhere) the message was clear: Counterfeit chips got away with it, will get away with it. Legal and market forces only care about the here and now and will force legitimate companies to not interfere with counterfeiters.

One might say "Nobody issued a statement even remotely resembling what you just said".

True. Nobody ever does. We are defined by our actions. Society and individuals. In this case society cared more about immediate effects rather than the promotion and maintenance of a healthy ecosystem based on laws and regulations that, among other things, respect intellectual property and ownership rights.

The net result of taking this path is easy to predict: Nobody is ever going to challenge counterfeits because of the way the marketplace --due to shortsightedness-- pushed back on FTDI. Nobody wants to be the focus of a mob.

And so we are now in a situation where consumers, because of this path, will remain the victims for decades to come. Today, they, quite literally, have no idea what's inside the devices they purchase and legitimate hardware manufacturers dare not challenge counterfeits for fear of what the mob might do.

This is, at least to me, a clear case of good intentions not thought through to completion actually causing more damage to consumers in the long term in exchange for a short term benefit. This is why I think it was a terrible decision not to take the pain, support FTDI, repair/replace devices and send a strong message to counterfeiters that they risk going bankrupt rather than the opposite.

Part of that encapsulates the second scenario, one where counterfeiters are not allowed to derive financial gains from their operations. That would have been the true pro-consumer stance. And one that would have delivered a future where consumers could have a reasonable certainty of quality, safety and performance from the products they purchase.

I am not going to lay the entire responsibility of the counterfeit problem on the FTDI event, that would be preposterous. However, this was a very clear cause-and-effect case where one choice was to punish counterfeit makers (and the companies who knowingly use their products to increase profits) and the other was to think consumers were being protected by pounding down the legitimate manufacturer when, in reality, the outcome was precisely the opposite when a long term view is taken.

I can't imagine anyone making an argument proposing the unencumbered proliferation of counterfeits (anything, not just chips) is good for consumers. I think what was done with the FTDI case was extremely shortsighted and damaging.

I can't understand how a component supplier would comingle their traceable stock.

EDIT: since this is getting downvotes.

A component supplier would destroy customer trust if they supplied fakes with traceability certificates. It would mean anyone building for aerospace or military or medical or mining or etc etc (all large, multibillion dollar industries) would have to avoid that supplier. So what's in it for the component supplier?

I accept the fakes are common. I accept people bought fakes from reputable suppliers. What I don't accept is that people bought fakes when they asked for traceable components. I don't accept that companies buyign direct from FTDI got fake components.