3 ms·

Because they're breaking the consumer's experience, not the vendor's. I guess their assumption is that angry consumers will trickle up to the vendor and cause t

by bri3d 11y ago

Because they're breaking the consumer's experience, not the vendor's. I guess their assumption is that angry consumers will trickle up to the vendor and cause them to go "genuine," but that seems unlikely to me. Why? Because as a consumer, I have no way of knowing whether the FTDI product I'm buying is genuine. It adds risk to buying anything that says "FTDI" on it. I'm not going to vote with my wallet for some nebulous, unverifiable assertion that a chip will be real FTDI before I get it. I'm going to vote for something I know I can plug in and use. Already a lot of counterfeit users of FTDI (i.e. knockoff Arduinos and cheap "VAG-COM KKL" auto diagnostic cables) are switching to CH340 instead of buying real FTDI.

ChuckMcM 11y ago
I agree, and then the consumer decides it isn't worth buying the knock-offs, and the vendor switches to something which costs more than their counterfeit but isn't as expensive as the FTDI parts and we're back to competing above ground rather than below ground. I'm hoping we can train consumers to not buy things based on "lowest price" without understanding what was done to achieve that price.
tzs 11y ago
> Already a lot of counterfeit users of FTDI (i.e. knockoff Arduinos and cheap "VAG-COM KKL" auto diagnostic cables) are switching to CH340 instead of buying real FTDI. The driver situation for CH340 seems a bit sketchy. Whenever I've considered buying cheap Arduino Uno R3 clones via aliexpress.com, but then first went searching for CH340 OS X drivers, all I've found have been drivers on random sites whose provenance seems to be "I found this somewhere". Often these are unsigned drivers so I'd have to disable driver signing to use them, although last time I looked there was a set of signed drivers floating around. For Arduino knockoffs, I prefer something that uses the same hardware that a genuine Arduino would use, or something that works with the CDC driver that comes with the OS. For Uno R3, this is the clone I'm using for development [1]. It uses an ATmega16u2 to handle the USB, which is what a genuine Uno R3 uses. [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00P2FX9WY?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00P2FX9WY?psc=1&redirect=t...

by bri3d 11y ago

ChuckMcM 11y ago

I agree, and then the consumer decides it isn't worth buying the knock-offs, and the vendor switches to something which costs more than their counterfeit but isn't as expensive as the FTDI parts and we're back to competing above ground rather than below ground. I'm hoping we can train consumers to not buy things based on "lowest price" without understanding what was done to achieve that price.

tzs 11y ago

> Already a lot of counterfeit users of FTDI (i.e. knockoff Arduinos and cheap "VAG-COM KKL" auto diagnostic cables) are switching to CH340 instead of buying real FTDI. The driver situation for CH340 seems a bit sketchy. Whenever I've considered buying cheap Arduino Uno R3 clones via aliexpress.com, but then first went searching for CH340 OS X drivers, all I've found have been drivers on random sites whose provenance seems to be "I found this somewhere". Often these are unsigned drivers so I'd have to disable driver signing to use them, although last time I looked there was a set of signed drivers floating around. For Arduino knockoffs, I prefer something that uses the same hardware that a genuine Arduino would use, or something that works with the CDC driver that comes with the OS. For Uno R3, this is the clone I'm using for development [1]. It uses an ATmega16u2 to handle the USB, which is what a genuine Uno R3 uses. [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00P2FX9WY?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00P2FX9WY?psc=1&redirect=t...