5 ms·

Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked

155 points by jandeboevrie 2y ago

gravescale 2y ago
Awesome. Reminds me of the time that an expensive Spectrum Digital XDS200 probe didn't work on Linux, and then bricked while I was doing the firmware upgrade it said it wanted. SD said the only thing I could do would be return it to the US to be reflashed. The cheap clone worked out of the box, so that was nice!
userbinator 2y ago
There are even cheaper clones based on the infamous Cypress (now Infineon) FX2LP which can also function as a logic analyser, signal generator, USB-parallel, or USB-serial adapter.
- rasz 2y ago
  Why infamous? Btw Chinese company Corebai cloned FX2 and sells it as CBM9002A at ~$2.5 while Cypress is $4-16 https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/logic-analyzers-decoding-and-monitoring/ https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/logic-analyzers-decoding-and...
  - userbinator 2y ago
    Infamous because USBee was the first to sell overpriced logic analysers based on the FX2 reference devboard, then Saleae did the same (a little less overpriced) but they both complained about all the clones, and tried to "FTDI them" which also caught their own original devices: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/warning-about-usbee/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/warning-about-usbee/ That Corebai clone is interesting. They apparently also have a CBM9001A which is a clone of the Cypress SL811HS (the datasheet is a search-and-replace, they even forgot to do that to the PDF properties), and almost all their other products are marketed as "Replace" for ICs from big brands like Maxim and Analog Devices. I wonder if these are layout-RE'd clones or reimplementations --- I suspect the latter.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      You keep calling all those original devices overpriced, but what exactly makes them overpriced in your option? To me it's wild how (not singling you out specifically) well paid people have no issue paying on a daily basis 8$ for a shitty cup of Starbucks or 18$ for a mediocre sandwich in London or California, stuff that you then piss and poop away, but asking them to pay 10$-60$ one time for a widget like an Original Arduino or a Salee, developed by skilled people that lasts you for life, that's suddenly overpriced. It's as if people expect electronic devices to only cost the sum of their wholesale parts, preferably at the manufacturing costs in a country with no workers rights and no IP rights, and ignoring the skilled labor that goes into the IP of the originals.
      - tecleandor 2y ago
        It'd be nice if it were 20-60$, but weren't USBee AX Pro more like $500 when they released them?
        Rinzler89 2y ago
        Maybe they were I don' remember exactly, but you also have to put the price in the context of that era, when oscilloscopes were only available form the established manufacturers costing thousands of $, and before the era of community FOSS HW designs enabling devs to pool their knowledge for free. So even 500$ for a high quality hobbyist USB scope with good SW was considered affordable and definitely not overpriced. 500$ price was actually very disruptive to the established scope industry. And developing those 500 scopes and SW at western wages, doesn't come cheap, and since the SW was free, the only way to recoup the R&D and turn a profit was through the margins on HW sales
        NikkiA 2y ago
        The era of $500 scopes arrived before USB, initially with the $700 or so Tek TDS210, the price rapidly falling from there as everyone clamoured for the garage engineer market.
        2y ago
- stavros 2y ago
  I have one of those, it works great with the Saleae software. Mine is a few years old, I wonder if there are better clones out nowadays.
bastard_op 2y ago
Yet another lobsters repost, but a good one. At what point do they just merge with HN? > I think what’s going on here is if your device pretends to be an FTDI chip, but it doesn’t perfectly emulate it, weird stuff happens when the official FTDI driver doesn’t see something it’s expecting. I’ll leave it to you as the reader to decide whether that’s accidental or intentional on FTDI’s part. Whether it’s accidental or not, I think it’s pretty bad that the driver can crash the system if the device doesn’t respond correctly. This particularly was a good comment. I guess this is what happens when vendors like FTDI have to fend of an army of chinese clones underselling their IP, introduce a BSOD in windoze driver when the chip isn't perfectly theirs.
- seventyone 2y ago
  > At what point do they just merge with HN? Maybe they don't want to volunteer their time and resources to drive traffic to a venture capitalist's website disguised as a hacker community
- RealStickman_ 2y ago
  A lot of good articles on HN get reposted to Lobsters, why should the inverse not also be the case sometimes?
JDW1023 2y ago
This is an impressive article. I'm not very familiar with hardware debugging, so I would have given up if I saw the exact same input yielding different outputs on the device in wireshark.
squarefoot 2y ago
Great writeup. Author writes they had problems with a FTDI chip. While this time it might be unrelated to purposely defective drivers, it's worth recalling what happened years ago when FTDI decided to fight against clones by hitting their users. https://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innocent-users-chips-in-silent-update/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innoce...
snvzz 2y ago
These USB blasters are infamous. There is a market for a generic, open hardware such device that actually works.
Topgamer7 2y ago
> Not bad for a nights work Jeez, it took me like a week just to program a usb hwmon temperature device for Linux
jalk 2y ago
If you already had an RPI pico, couldn’t you use something like https://github.com/kholia/xvc-pico https://github.com/kholia/xvc-pico from the start?
- dougg3 2y ago
  Hi, I’m the author of this post. I’m not aware of a similar Pico project that acts as an Altera USB Blaster clone. Seems like an interesting project idea though! The CH552 firmware I used would provide a good sample to start from.
Dwedit 2y ago
Get the $300 cable to avoid having to debug someone else's shoddy product?
- brokenmachine 2y ago
  The fourth paragraph in the article advises to buy the $69 cable.
Brightonos40 2y ago
[flagged]
- brokenmachine 2y ago
  Good morning. Just write your google username and password into the comment box here and someone will help you out ASAP.

155 points by jandeboevrie 2y ago

Awesome. Reminds me of the time that an expensive Spectrum Digital XDS200 probe didn't work on Linux, and then bricked while I was doing the firmware upgrade it said it wanted. SD said the only thing I could do would be return it to the US to be reflashed. The cheap clone worked out of the box, so that was nice!

userbinator 2y ago

There are even cheaper clones based on the infamous Cypress (now Infineon) FX2LP which can also function as a logic analyser, signal generator, USB-parallel, or USB-serial adapter.

rasz 2y ago
Why infamous? Btw Chinese company Corebai cloned FX2 and sells it as CBM9002A at ~$2.5 while Cypress is $4-16 https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/logic-analyzers-decoding-and-monitoring/ https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/logic-analyzers-decoding-and...
- userbinator 2y ago
  Infamous because USBee was the first to sell overpriced logic analysers based on the FX2 reference devboard, then Saleae did the same (a little less overpriced) but they both complained about all the clones, and tried to "FTDI them" which also caught their own original devices: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/warning-about-usbee/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/warning-about-usbee/ That Corebai clone is interesting. They apparently also have a CBM9001A which is a clone of the Cypress SL811HS (the datasheet is a search-and-replace, they even forgot to do that to the PDF properties), and almost all their other products are marketed as "Replace" for ICs from big brands like Maxim and Analog Devices. I wonder if these are layout-RE'd clones or reimplementations --- I suspect the latter.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    You keep calling all those original devices overpriced, but what exactly makes them overpriced in your option? To me it's wild how (not singling you out specifically) well paid people have no issue paying on a daily basis 8$ for a shitty cup of Starbucks or 18$ for a mediocre sandwich in London or California, stuff that you then piss and poop away, but asking them to pay 10$-60$ one time for a widget like an Original Arduino or a Salee, developed by skilled people that lasts you for life, that's suddenly overpriced. It's as if people expect electronic devices to only cost the sum of their wholesale parts, preferably at the manufacturing costs in a country with no workers rights and no IP rights, and ignoring the skilled labor that goes into the IP of the originals.
    - tecleandor 2y ago
      It'd be nice if it were 20-60$, but weren't USBee AX Pro more like $500 when they released them?
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        Maybe they were I don' remember exactly, but you also have to put the price in the context of that era, when oscilloscopes were only available form the established manufacturers costing thousands of $, and before the era of community FOSS HW designs enabling devs to pool their knowledge for free. So even 500$ for a high quality hobbyist USB scope with good SW was considered affordable and definitely not overpriced. 500$ price was actually very disruptive to the established scope industry. And developing those 500 scopes and SW at western wages, doesn't come cheap, and since the SW was free, the only way to recoup the R&D and turn a profit was through the margins on HW sales
        NikkiA 2y ago
        The era of $500 scopes arrived before USB, initially with the $700 or so Tek TDS210, the price rapidly falling from there as everyone clamoured for the garage engineer market.
      - 2y ago
stavros 2y ago
I have one of those, it works great with the Saleae software. Mine is a few years old, I wonder if there are better clones out nowadays.

bastard_op 2y ago

Yet another lobsters repost, but a good one. At what point do they just merge with HN? > I think what’s going on here is if your device pretends to be an FTDI chip, but it doesn’t perfectly emulate it, weird stuff happens when the official FTDI driver doesn’t see something it’s expecting. I’ll leave it to you as the reader to decide whether that’s accidental or intentional on FTDI’s part. Whether it’s accidental or not, I think it’s pretty bad that the driver can crash the system if the device doesn’t respond correctly. This particularly was a good comment. I guess this is what happens when vendors like FTDI have to fend of an army of chinese clones underselling their IP, introduce a BSOD in windoze driver when the chip isn't perfectly theirs.

seventyone 2y ago
> At what point do they just merge with HN? Maybe they don't want to volunteer their time and resources to drive traffic to a venture capitalist's website disguised as a hacker community
RealStickman_ 2y ago
A lot of good articles on HN get reposted to Lobsters, why should the inverse not also be the case sometimes?

JDW1023 2y ago

This is an impressive article. I'm not very familiar with hardware debugging, so I would have given up if I saw the exact same input yielding different outputs on the device in wireshark.

squarefoot 2y ago

Great writeup. Author writes they had problems with a FTDI chip. While this time it might be unrelated to purposely defective drivers, it's worth recalling what happened years ago when FTDI decided to fight against clones by hitting their users. https://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innocent-users-chips-in-silent-update/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innoce...

snvzz 2y ago

These USB blasters are infamous. There is a market for a generic, open hardware such device that actually works.

Topgamer7 2y ago

> Not bad for a nights work Jeez, it took me like a week just to program a usb hwmon temperature device for Linux

jalk 2y ago

If you already had an RPI pico, couldn’t you use something like https://github.com/kholia/xvc-pico https://github.com/kholia/xvc-pico from the start?

dougg3 2y ago
Hi, I’m the author of this post. I’m not aware of a similar Pico project that acts as an Altera USB Blaster clone. Seems like an interesting project idea though! The CH552 firmware I used would provide a good sample to start from.

Dwedit 2y ago

Get the $300 cable to avoid having to debug someone else's shoddy product?

brokenmachine 2y ago
The fourth paragraph in the article advises to buy the $69 cable.

Brightonos40 2y ago

[flagged]

brokenmachine 2y ago
Good morning. Just write your google username and password into the comment box here and someone will help you out ASAP.