5 ms·

Yep. Lawyers will always take the road of least liability. I have no doubt the lawyer said to not even write about it publicly. I stopped trusting adafruit whe

Yep. Lawyers will always take the road of least liability. I have no doubt the lawyer said to not even write about it publicly. I stopped trusting adafruit when they sent me broken boards and never replaced them. Their software side is very startupy, they love to break things, especially if it was working perfectly fine before. I have a USB to uart/SPI/i2c adafruit device that won't operate in any of those modes without changing windows drivers between them, and ontop of it requires local side circuit python and it used to just be C. Circuit python was a huge mistake on their part. They didn't have the people to do C correctly (look at their nrf libraries), much less C and circuit python versions. Which ends up being a compatability nightmare. So I just buy a 5 pack of esp32's or other dev boards off Amazon and be done with it. If they're broke, I get them for free. Sad to see that Amazon breaks less consumer laws than Adafruit in this case.

gompertz 5y ago
The USB to uart/i2c/spi issue is due to them using counterfeit chips. https://hackaday.com/2016/02/01/ftdi-drivers-break-fake-chips-again/ https://hackaday.com/2016/02/01/ftdi-drivers-break-fake-chip...
- fpgaminer 5y ago
  > No surprise really since most adafruit stuff is rebranded Ali express merchandise. I don't know that I've ever seen rebranded Aliexpress merch on Adafruit. Boards and such are primarily their own design. Proof being ... it's all open source and the design files are on Github. There's occasionally other vendor's products there, like Pimoroni. Again, not rebranded Aliexpress. Besides boards, there's tools and such, but those have all been on brand from what I've seen. Adafruit is how I found out about the fantastic Japanese ENGINEER brand. They generally put a lot of effort into combing through suppliers and finding good quality stuff.
  - gompertz 5y ago
    I edited my comment. That's fair comments... I meant more the non-board stuff such as wires/interconnects etc. I actually saw a thread once where people were able to correlate bulk purchases on Alibaba/Ali (since they publish it with redacted usernames) with Adafruit on stock of certain supplies.
    - colejohnson66 5y ago
      It's entirely possible the passive components they sell are repackaged AliExpress stuff. But I'd guess it's because the passives are the same quality a hobbyist would get from buying on Amazon. Their "secret sauce" is the boards and software they design.
- jrockway 5y ago
  Actually, Aliexpress vendors are rebranding their merchandise. Adafruit publishes the board files, then someone removes their logo and sells it for $1 less on Amazon. If you have any doubt that Adafruit is doing their own designs, Lady Ada often streams herself designing new boards. In general, they have reliable supply chains and manufacture everything in New York City. I have never heard of them selling counterfeit FTDI chips. I have two of their FT232H modules purchased directly through their store and they're legit.
fpgaminer 5y ago
> I stopped trusting adafruit when they sent me broken boards and never replaced them. They refunded me a $100 purchase, no return required, when I was sent defective product. I've always found their customer service to be friendly. > Their software side is very startupy, they love to break things, especially if it was working perfectly fine before. This is a very odd sentence to read in the context of embedded development. Adafruit is a hardware company with makers as a target market. I find Adafruit's software to be a good bit better than most vendor software I've worked with. And when there are bugs, most of the time the bug ends up being someone else's fault. cough Espressif cough.
ravenstine 5y ago
> Yep. Lawyers will always take the road of least liability. I have no doubt the lawyer said to not even write about it publicly. That's what I think a lot of business owners and managemwnt don't quite understand about lawyers. If you listened to everything your lawyers are telling you, then you would never do anything interesting (i.e. anything risky). You don't necessarily have to listen to everything a lawyer says because their incentive is to limit your risk, not necessarily to ensure your long term success, which are different things. If it means doing wrong by your customers then lawyers may tell you to do it if it means a micron less liability.
999900000999 5y ago
Amazon doesn't need to turn a profit, this is both good and bad. It's bad because smaller companies can't compete. And many of these smaller companies do more for the community than Amazon does. Good luck calling Amazon for help with picking a sensor. It's good because if you return stuff you'll save money with Amazon. Like the times I buy things outside of Amazon I'm amazed to see I can't return it, of the penalty for doing so is like 40% of the item cost.

gompertz 5y ago

The USB to uart/i2c/spi issue is due to them using counterfeit chips. https://hackaday.com/2016/02/01/ftdi-drivers-break-fake-chips-again/ https://hackaday.com/2016/02/01/ftdi-drivers-break-fake-chip...

fpgaminer 5y ago
> No surprise really since most adafruit stuff is rebranded Ali express merchandise. I don't know that I've ever seen rebranded Aliexpress merch on Adafruit. Boards and such are primarily their own design. Proof being ... it's all open source and the design files are on Github. There's occasionally other vendor's products there, like Pimoroni. Again, not rebranded Aliexpress. Besides boards, there's tools and such, but those have all been on brand from what I've seen. Adafruit is how I found out about the fantastic Japanese ENGINEER brand. They generally put a lot of effort into combing through suppliers and finding good quality stuff.
- gompertz 5y ago
  I edited my comment. That's fair comments... I meant more the non-board stuff such as wires/interconnects etc. I actually saw a thread once where people were able to correlate bulk purchases on Alibaba/Ali (since they publish it with redacted usernames) with Adafruit on stock of certain supplies.
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    It's entirely possible the passive components they sell are repackaged AliExpress stuff. But I'd guess it's because the passives are the same quality a hobbyist would get from buying on Amazon. Their "secret sauce" is the boards and software they design.
jrockway 5y ago
Actually, Aliexpress vendors are rebranding their merchandise. Adafruit publishes the board files, then someone removes their logo and sells it for $1 less on Amazon. If you have any doubt that Adafruit is doing their own designs, Lady Ada often streams herself designing new boards. In general, they have reliable supply chains and manufacture everything in New York City. I have never heard of them selling counterfeit FTDI chips. I have two of their FT232H modules purchased directly through their store and they're legit.

fpgaminer 5y ago

> I stopped trusting adafruit when they sent me broken boards and never replaced them. They refunded me a $100 purchase, no return required, when I was sent defective product. I've always found their customer service to be friendly. > Their software side is very startupy, they love to break things, especially if it was working perfectly fine before. This is a very odd sentence to read in the context of embedded development. Adafruit is a hardware company with makers as a target market. I find Adafruit's software to be a good bit better than most vendor software I've worked with. And when there are bugs, most of the time the bug ends up being someone else's fault. cough Espressif cough.

ravenstine 5y ago

> Yep. Lawyers will always take the road of least liability. I have no doubt the lawyer said to not even write about it publicly. That's what I think a lot of business owners and managemwnt don't quite understand about lawyers. If you listened to everything your lawyers are telling you, then you would never do anything interesting (i.e. anything risky). You don't necessarily have to listen to everything a lawyer says because their incentive is to limit your risk, not necessarily to ensure your long term success, which are different things. If it means doing wrong by your customers then lawyers may tell you to do it if it means a micron less liability.

999900000999 5y ago

Amazon doesn't need to turn a profit, this is both good and bad. It's bad because smaller companies can't compete. And many of these smaller companies do more for the community than Amazon does. Good luck calling Amazon for help with picking a sensor. It's good because if you return stuff you'll save money with Amazon. Like the times I buy things outside of Amazon I'm amazed to see I can't return it, of the penalty for doing so is like 40% of the item cost.