> although for some very high volume or simple, old parts, it's a bit more common And often the prevalence of the high volume parts actually makes it nearly im

> although for some very high volume or simple, old parts, it's a bit more common And often the prevalence of the high volume parts actually makes it nearly impossible to find things using the originals. For example, I once wanted a real FT232 breakout board (or at least a clone that can do most of what the original can do) to use some of the bit-banging features of the chip. But the most popular clones of that chip are very much reduced functionality variants that work as a USB-to-UART but don't do most of the other functionality. This was probably not helped by the fact that the original chips, and early more faithful replicas had onboard flash and allowed a degree of programming, but then the manufacturer of the original chip embedded malware in their Windows driver that detected and wrote bad data to the clones flash (which would have broken many products sold to consumers with them - technically fixable by removing the driver and re-flashing, but probably in most cases just becoming e-waste). So the clone manufacturers responded by simplifying: removing the flash, and removing most of the programmable functionality, and focusing on the UART part that was the most common use case. Now, no matter how hard you try pre-purchase to make sure something is a full FT232 implementation (including asking for assurance about the chip up front) on a marketplace like Aliexpress or eBay, you are far more likely than not to got a limited functionality clone.