12 ms·

I'm probably going to get kicked in the face for this one but sparkfun are stepping beyond the realms of sensibility here and are turning this into a war with r

by bananas 13y ago

I'm probably going to get kicked in the face for this one but sparkfun are stepping beyond the realms of sensibility here and are turning this into a war with random internet people who get offended easily to draw attention to Fluke and away from themselves and a really crappy purchasing and import decision. I'm well on Fluke's side here as a an actual qualified electrical engineer. I trust Fluke's products and have done for over 20 years. Multimeters are more than just budget devices to measure voltages, amperages and resistance. They sit between you and part of a circuit that might well kill you through electrocution or explosions. All it takes is a miswired socket, earth fault or short in a power supply and you've got 110-240v going up your arm and you're dead. Either that or the meter explodes, removing your fingers or spraying bits of plastic and metal into your eyes. Yes it's that graphic. To present that piece of junk as high quality device for $15 is totally wrong to start with. Even without reviewing it, it's not possible to purchase the isolation circuitry for that price from a Chinese component manufacturer. Sparkfun is purely aimed at amateurs as expected but to go on this witch hunt is wrong. Fluke are worried people will assume that these will be associated with their brand and rightfully so want that association removed. And obviously, on that basis, they're being destroyed so someone agrees. I wouldn't touch one of those meters with a 20 foot long rubber pole and I wouldn't want them on the shelf next to a proper meter. SparkFun are wrong as are probably most of the people cheering for the demise of Fluke here.

swalsh 13y ago
This is exactly what a trademark is intended for. If I started a home goods store called "Home Hut", and made the logo a large orange square... i'd also be infringing, and for good reason. Home depot has built a reputation, and that trade mark orange is representative of that reputation.
- lsaferite 13y ago
  And if I start a home improvement store using a tomatoish orange and call it "Bob's Home Store" would that also fall afoul of trademark in your book? In the case of the DMM in question, it's not direct knock-off of a Fluke and according to SF the color is more of an orange-yellow than the Fluke safety yellow. SF's whole point is that the TM terms are too vague. Gray with a yellow border. What shade of gray? What shade of yellow? I don't get to claim a whole primary color and say you can make a DMM using any color even close to this.
evan_ 13y ago
It's a low cost device for hobbyists who want to test their arduinos. The fact that it can't be used with a 240v source is irrelevant. If its safety limits are improperly marked, then you have a valid criticism. You sound like you really just have a problem with electronics hobbyist amateurs who deign to intrude on your actual qualified electrical engineer grandeur. Get over it.
- bananas 13y ago
  Not at all. Watch someone get electrocuted through shitty test equipment or a poor earth and you'll get the idea. Doesn't matter if it's an Arduino connected to a PC with an earth fault or a $30000 scope. People just don't GET electrical safety and it's a really big problem. It's nothing to do with grandeur - it's understanding the whole problem.
  - bronson 13y ago
    Uh huh. I'm an EE and I'm calling your BS. It's fine for people to use PCs (and lamps and toasters and blenders) even though they might have earth faults. It's fine for people to charge their phones even though there's a nonzero chance they'll use a counterfeit charger. And it's perfectly fine for people to probe 5V circuits using a $15.00 multimeter. If you're really claiming that everyone needs a $400 Fluke before they can probe the circuit they just soldered together then I can only guess that you're really hurting for work?
    - Retric 13y ago
      And I call BS on you. People do get electrocuted when dealing with toasters and other home electronics on a somewhat regular basis. "The Consumer Products Safety Commission estimates that on average 15 people are electrocuted in the U.S. annually due to faulty or misused home electrical appliances, including toasters."
      - bronson 13y ago
        So you don't use toasters?
jpwright 13y ago
That has nothing to do with the trademark issue at hand, and no one is cheering for the demise of Fluke (the post is actually very complimentary of Fluke products). For people working with 5V circuits (e.g. Arduinos), you don't need to worry about AC power killing you or your multimeter exploding. A cheap multimeter is OK in a pinch.
- bananas 13y ago
  Until you connect your Arduino's USB cable to your computer which is on a faulty earth and then realise that you have 100-240v going through your mains, to your computer case, up your USB cable, through your meter, up your arm, across your chest, down your desk leg and back to earth... The potential difference between the 5v and GND on your Ardunio might be 5v but between your Arduino GND and real earth might be 180v floating. Believe me that shit is scary and will kill you. I'd rather people blew $250 on a meter and actually read up on electrical safety to be honest. If that's prohibitive, you're welcome to kill yourself through ignorance.
  - mindslight 13y ago
    > your computer which is on a faulty earth ... to your computer case This can certainly happen and is indeed dangerous, but if the first time you find out is while experimenting with a USB peripheral on a test bench (as opposed to say resting your bare legs on the case), you should consider yourself lucky.
  - makomk 13y ago
    Why stop at multimeters, though? I mean, what would happen if you connected a USB drive "to your computer which is on a faulty earth and then realise that you have 100-240v going through your mains, to your computer case, up your USB cable, through your [hand], up your arm, across your chest, down your desk leg and back to earth". Clearly anyone selling $15 USB drives is endangering their customers and we should all buy $250 safety-rated ones.
  - jpwright 13y ago
    In that case your computer is a death trap certain to cause fatal electrical shock the next time you connect your printer, flash drive, or USB nerf missile launcher. Your expensive multimeter probably won't save you in time (seriously though, do you test the grounding of your computer case every time you use it?)
solve 13y ago
Blind brand loyalty isn't always a good thing, especially over the span of 20+ years where you stop even testing the alternatives. Technology advances FAST. You say nothing about having actually evaluated the cheaper alternatives in person? Are you sure that despite exponential increases in technology that prices haven't come down at all? Are you sure about the true production costs, if you eliminate the 20 layers of middlemen and are only paying the 10cents / hour miners + 20cents / hour workers? This is a finance / markets question, not an engineering question. Lots of strong emotions, not so sure about the evidence. Technology and cost of technology never stops advancing. Numerous large companies are guilty of price-fixing, e.g. the large-scale monitor price-fixing scandals from a few years ago. Bet you never even heard of those cases?
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Parts sourcing is part of engineering. He is right, well designed high voltage protection is not going to be cheap, and these meters are obviously not designed with anything but digital testbench in mind.
  - mindslight 13y ago
    High voltage doesn't automatically mean expensive. We're talking about low-speed battery-powered equipment whose only I/O is through buttons and an LCD, not something like a USB oscilloscope that needs high-speed galvanic isolation. Getting the details (shrouding, creepage, plastics) right (and keeping them that way) is going to take design time and vigilant QA, but the parts themselves aren't inherently expensive.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - solve 13y ago
    No. Parts sourcing is not even close to getting your pals that you know at the factory to slip in a custom assembly run, just paying the absolutely minimal costs and nearly 100% of the money going to the very bottom $1/hour end-workers. There's an assumption that price=quality. That's ok, until we get into the extreme cases. We're talking about the extreme limits of how cheaply this could be done. The prices of the raw materials are not high, they're not made of solid gold or rare-earth materials. Assembly costs almost nothing.
sliverstorm 13y ago
On the bright side, the people reading sparkfun and getting pissed at fluke, probably never would have bought a fluke anyway, so no tremendous loss here. The market for $15 meters and fluke meters doesn't overlap much. It's been a while since I shopped DMMs, but isn't their entry-level meter ~$250?
- jff 13y ago
  Hell, even the guy who wrote the original article isn't in Fluke's target market apparently: "I’ve never had the opportunity to own a Fluke-branded DMM"
mindslight 13y ago
So, since the design[1] and construction of a multimeter is important (I wholeheartedly agree), do you simply look for ones that have a yellow border with a dark face, and trust that this implies they're well made? Or might you look for the actual trademark 'FLUKE', and even buy from a reputable distributor to avoid outright counterfeits? Personally I'm not a Fluke junkie, and think there's plenty of reputable mid-range meters that will protect you just fine. However I also think that a distributor-branded direct-import is not likely to be one of these. But as far as trademarks, we're really talking about two quite functional colors here - a neutral-colored face for readability, and a bright shroud on the other sides for visibility. Many meters have been using these color styles for quite some time and, as your loyalty to Fluke illustrates, this does little to dilute their brand. [1] Electronic design, as would be implied by the context if not for confusion induced by graphic/industrial designers thinking they have a monopoly on the term.
- fancyketchup 13y ago
  I'm not a Fluke junkie either, but I don't buy the "functional colors" argument. Nobody made a multimeter that looked like that until Fluke started doing it. Fluke also makes a range of "intrinsically safe" multimeters with a red instead of orange border. Are those less "functional?" They are certainly less well-known, so it wouldn't make sense to copy them. It's the same as the cheapo "bench" multimeters that have five input terminals and the same layout as an Agilent 344xxA (or Fluke 88xx) but don't have a 4-wire Ohms function (or even a low-enough range to need 4-wire Ohms) or a proper guard connection (which is the purpose of the the 5th terminal).
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
Fuxy 13y ago
How can you approve any company just patenting a multimeter with a gray front and a yellow back. Get real that is very common color scheme for multimeters and it is an unrealistic expectation of Fluke that everybody associates that to their products only. Case and point how many gray and yellow multimeters can you see here [1]? [1] www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=multimeters
- bananas 13y ago
  This is only because of the brand success of Fluke and they want to be associated with it. But it's a dangerous bridge to cross.
  - Fuxy 13y ago
    It's a bit late to enforce it now then isn't it? It's not associated with your brand anymore. I for one never associated that color scheme with that brand didn't even hear of Fluke before this but i did associate it with multimeters in general. So what's the point of defending something you don't even own anymore.
- hamiltonkibbe 13y ago
  In this case the entire design (color, shape, etc) is nearly identical to my Fluke meter. I'm sure they're not going after every yellow and gray meter on the market. These are clearly designed to look just like a Fluke meter
  - Fuxy 13y ago
    They all look the same to me a small curve it's not going to make much difference. And it's not like it has the Fluke logo on it or anything.
    - hamiltonkibbe 13y ago
      It certainly doesn't have the fluke logo on it, but as someone who uses yellow multimeters fairly regularly (Fluke and otherwise) I immediately (and possibly mistakenly) recognized the design (shape, color, the specific rotary switch used) as that of the particular model Fluke multimeter I have in my drawer. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I own two yellow multimeters and only one is a Fluke)
michaelt 13y ago
All it takes is a miswired socket, earth fault or short in a power supply and you've got 110-240v going up your arm and you're dead. Either that or the meter explodes, removing your fingers or spraying bits of plastic and metal into your eyes. If these are a serious danger I think people should be better informed. I'd like to make a youtube video demonstrating the problem. I have a £15 multimeter [1] and 240v residential mains electricity. How would I go about demonstrating the problem? [1] http://www.toolstation.com/shop/Hand+Tools/Electricians+Tools/Draper+Multimeter+with+Light/d10/sd170/p98689 http://www.toolstation.com/shop/Hand+Tools/Electricians+Tool...
- hamiltonkibbe 13y ago
  Plug a cheap, transformerless, USB charger into a socket that's wired backwards, and touch the shield of the connector by accident when plugging it into your cell phone
  - michaelt 13y ago
    But where does the £15 multimeter fit into that?
    - hamiltonkibbe 13y ago
      measuring the potential between the shield and your tongue... I (maybe inaccurately) read the parent comment as "If miswired sockets REALLY are a hazard to people messing around with 5V electronics, prove it"
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
"All it takes is a miswired socket, earth fault or short in a power supply and you've got 110-240v going up your arm and you're dead. " It seems to me that you are not a qualified electrical engineer. Those three words are incompatible with the above statement. Probably you are engineer, when I come from in Europe this title means something serious, but in other countries means very little. But qualified you are not. I AM electrical engineer and you don't know what you are talking about. In my country we say that it is easier to catch a liar than a gammy person.
- bhousel 13y ago
  I'm curious what you think about his statement was wrong. Don't dumb it down, I'm an electrical engineer too :) Deaths do happen at low voltage. They aren't very common, but they are possible, and faulty test equipment is a serious problem: http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/98-131/pdfs/98-131.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/98-131/pdfs/98-131.pdf

by bananas 13y ago

swalsh 13y ago

This is exactly what a trademark is intended for. If I started a home goods store called "Home Hut", and made the logo a large orange square... i'd also be infringing, and for good reason. Home depot has built a reputation, and that trade mark orange is representative of that reputation.

lsaferite 13y ago
And if I start a home improvement store using a tomatoish orange and call it "Bob's Home Store" would that also fall afoul of trademark in your book? In the case of the DMM in question, it's not direct knock-off of a Fluke and according to SF the color is more of an orange-yellow than the Fluke safety yellow. SF's whole point is that the TM terms are too vague. Gray with a yellow border. What shade of gray? What shade of yellow? I don't get to claim a whole primary color and say you can make a DMM using any color even close to this.

evan_ 13y ago

It's a low cost device for hobbyists who want to test their arduinos. The fact that it can't be used with a 240v source is irrelevant. If its safety limits are improperly marked, then you have a valid criticism. You sound like you really just have a problem with electronics hobbyist amateurs who deign to intrude on your actual qualified electrical engineer grandeur. Get over it.

bananas 13y ago
Not at all. Watch someone get electrocuted through shitty test equipment or a poor earth and you'll get the idea. Doesn't matter if it's an Arduino connected to a PC with an earth fault or a $30000 scope. People just don't GET electrical safety and it's a really big problem. It's nothing to do with grandeur - it's understanding the whole problem.
- bronson 13y ago
  Uh huh. I'm an EE and I'm calling your BS. It's fine for people to use PCs (and lamps and toasters and blenders) even though they might have earth faults. It's fine for people to charge their phones even though there's a nonzero chance they'll use a counterfeit charger. And it's perfectly fine for people to probe 5V circuits using a $15.00 multimeter. If you're really claiming that everyone needs a $400 Fluke before they can probe the circuit they just soldered together then I can only guess that you're really hurting for work?
  - Retric 13y ago
    And I call BS on you. People do get electrocuted when dealing with toasters and other home electronics on a somewhat regular basis. "The Consumer Products Safety Commission estimates that on average 15 people are electrocuted in the U.S. annually due to faulty or misused home electrical appliances, including toasters."
    - bronson 13y ago
      So you don't use toasters?

jpwright 13y ago

That has nothing to do with the trademark issue at hand, and no one is cheering for the demise of Fluke (the post is actually very complimentary of Fluke products). For people working with 5V circuits (e.g. Arduinos), you don't need to worry about AC power killing you or your multimeter exploding. A cheap multimeter is OK in a pinch.

bananas 13y ago
Until you connect your Arduino's USB cable to your computer which is on a faulty earth and then realise that you have 100-240v going through your mains, to your computer case, up your USB cable, through your meter, up your arm, across your chest, down your desk leg and back to earth... The potential difference between the 5v and GND on your Ardunio might be 5v but between your Arduino GND and real earth might be 180v floating. Believe me that shit is scary and will kill you. I'd rather people blew $250 on a meter and actually read up on electrical safety to be honest. If that's prohibitive, you're welcome to kill yourself through ignorance.
- mindslight 13y ago
  > your computer which is on a faulty earth ... to your computer case This can certainly happen and is indeed dangerous, but if the first time you find out is while experimenting with a USB peripheral on a test bench (as opposed to say resting your bare legs on the case), you should consider yourself lucky.
- makomk 13y ago
  Why stop at multimeters, though? I mean, what would happen if you connected a USB drive "to your computer which is on a faulty earth and then realise that you have 100-240v going through your mains, to your computer case, up your USB cable, through your [hand], up your arm, across your chest, down your desk leg and back to earth". Clearly anyone selling $15 USB drives is endangering their customers and we should all buy $250 safety-rated ones.
- jpwright 13y ago
  In that case your computer is a death trap certain to cause fatal electrical shock the next time you connect your printer, flash drive, or USB nerf missile launcher. Your expensive multimeter probably won't save you in time (seriously though, do you test the grounding of your computer case every time you use it?)

solve 13y ago

Blind brand loyalty isn't always a good thing, especially over the span of 20+ years where you stop even testing the alternatives. Technology advances FAST. You say nothing about having actually evaluated the cheaper alternatives in person? Are you sure that despite exponential increases in technology that prices haven't come down at all? Are you sure about the true production costs, if you eliminate the 20 layers of middlemen and are only paying the 10cents / hour miners + 20cents / hour workers? This is a finance / markets question, not an engineering question. Lots of strong emotions, not so sure about the evidence. Technology and cost of technology never stops advancing. Numerous large companies are guilty of price-fixing, e.g. the large-scale monitor price-fixing scandals from a few years ago. Bet you never even heard of those cases?

sliverstorm 13y ago
Parts sourcing is part of engineering. He is right, well designed high voltage protection is not going to be cheap, and these meters are obviously not designed with anything but digital testbench in mind.
- mindslight 13y ago
  High voltage doesn't automatically mean expensive. We're talking about low-speed battery-powered equipment whose only I/O is through buttons and an LCD, not something like a USB oscilloscope that needs high-speed galvanic isolation. Getting the details (shrouding, creepage, plastics) right (and keeping them that way) is going to take design time and vigilant QA, but the parts themselves aren't inherently expensive.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- solve 13y ago
  No. Parts sourcing is not even close to getting your pals that you know at the factory to slip in a custom assembly run, just paying the absolutely minimal costs and nearly 100% of the money going to the very bottom $1/hour end-workers. There's an assumption that price=quality. That's ok, until we get into the extreme cases. We're talking about the extreme limits of how cheaply this could be done. The prices of the raw materials are not high, they're not made of solid gold or rare-earth materials. Assembly costs almost nothing.

sliverstorm 13y ago

On the bright side, the people reading sparkfun and getting pissed at fluke, probably never would have bought a fluke anyway, so no tremendous loss here. The market for $15 meters and fluke meters doesn't overlap much. It's been a while since I shopped DMMs, but isn't their entry-level meter ~$250?

jff 13y ago
Hell, even the guy who wrote the original article isn't in Fluke's target market apparently: "I’ve never had the opportunity to own a Fluke-branded DMM"

mindslight 13y ago

So, since the design[1] and construction of a multimeter is important (I wholeheartedly agree), do you simply look for ones that have a yellow border with a dark face, and trust that this implies they're well made? Or might you look for the actual trademark 'FLUKE', and even buy from a reputable distributor to avoid outright counterfeits? Personally I'm not a Fluke junkie, and think there's plenty of reputable mid-range meters that will protect you just fine. However I also think that a distributor-branded direct-import is not likely to be one of these. But as far as trademarks, we're really talking about two quite functional colors here - a neutral-colored face for readability, and a bright shroud on the other sides for visibility. Many meters have been using these color styles for quite some time and, as your loyalty to Fluke illustrates, this does little to dilute their brand. [1] Electronic design, as would be implied by the context if not for confusion induced by graphic/industrial designers thinking they have a monopoly on the term.

fancyketchup 13y ago
I'm not a Fluke junkie either, but I don't buy the "functional colors" argument. Nobody made a multimeter that looked like that until Fluke started doing it. Fluke also makes a range of "intrinsically safe" multimeters with a red instead of orange border. Are those less "functional?" They are certainly less well-known, so it wouldn't make sense to copy them. It's the same as the cheapo "bench" multimeters that have five input terminals and the same layout as an Agilent 344xxA (or Fluke 88xx) but don't have a 4-wire Ohms function (or even a low-enough range to need 4-wire Ohms) or a proper guard connection (which is the purpose of the the 5th terminal).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

Fuxy 13y ago

How can you approve any company just patenting a multimeter with a gray front and a yellow back. Get real that is very common color scheme for multimeters and it is an unrealistic expectation of Fluke that everybody associates that to their products only. Case and point how many gray and yellow multimeters can you see here [1]? [1] www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=multimeters

bananas 13y ago
This is only because of the brand success of Fluke and they want to be associated with it. But it's a dangerous bridge to cross.
- Fuxy 13y ago
  It's a bit late to enforce it now then isn't it? It's not associated with your brand anymore. I for one never associated that color scheme with that brand didn't even hear of Fluke before this but i did associate it with multimeters in general. So what's the point of defending something you don't even own anymore.
hamiltonkibbe 13y ago
In this case the entire design (color, shape, etc) is nearly identical to my Fluke meter. I'm sure they're not going after every yellow and gray meter on the market. These are clearly designed to look just like a Fluke meter
- Fuxy 13y ago
  They all look the same to me a small curve it's not going to make much difference. And it's not like it has the Fluke logo on it or anything.
  - hamiltonkibbe 13y ago
    It certainly doesn't have the fluke logo on it, but as someone who uses yellow multimeters fairly regularly (Fluke and otherwise) I immediately (and possibly mistakenly) recognized the design (shape, color, the specific rotary switch used) as that of the particular model Fluke multimeter I have in my drawer. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I own two yellow multimeters and only one is a Fluke)

michaelt 13y ago

All it takes is a miswired socket, earth fault or short in a power supply and you've got 110-240v going up your arm and you're dead. Either that or the meter explodes, removing your fingers or spraying bits of plastic and metal into your eyes. If these are a serious danger I think people should be better informed. I'd like to make a youtube video demonstrating the problem. I have a £15 multimeter [1] and 240v residential mains electricity. How would I go about demonstrating the problem? [1] http://www.toolstation.com/shop/Hand+Tools/Electricians+Tools/Draper+Multimeter+with+Light/d10/sd170/p98689 http://www.toolstation.com/shop/Hand+Tools/Electricians+Tool...

hamiltonkibbe 13y ago
Plug a cheap, transformerless, USB charger into a socket that's wired backwards, and touch the shield of the connector by accident when plugging it into your cell phone
- michaelt 13y ago
  But where does the £15 multimeter fit into that?
  - hamiltonkibbe 13y ago
    measuring the potential between the shield and your tongue... I (maybe inaccurately) read the parent comment as "If miswired sockets REALLY are a hazard to people messing around with 5V electronics, prove it"

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

"All it takes is a miswired socket, earth fault or short in a power supply and you've got 110-240v going up your arm and you're dead. " It seems to me that you are not a qualified electrical engineer. Those three words are incompatible with the above statement. Probably you are engineer, when I come from in Europe this title means something serious, but in other countries means very little. But qualified you are not. I AM electrical engineer and you don't know what you are talking about. In my country we say that it is easier to catch a liar than a gammy person.

bhousel 13y ago
I'm curious what you think about his statement was wrong. Don't dumb it down, I'm an electrical engineer too :) Deaths do happen at low voltage. They aren't very common, but they are possible, and faulty test equipment is a serious problem: http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/98-131/pdfs/98-131.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/98-131/pdfs/98-131.pdf