3 ms·

It's like you didn't even read my post! Of course many of us who have worked in hardware have had issues with bad parts. The idea that this justifies bricking

by zorpner 12y ago

It's like you didn't even read my post! Of course many of us who have worked in hardware have had issues with bad parts. The idea that this justifies bricking a piece of hardware when the driver on the controller system is upgraded is ludicrous and dangerous. Your decades of experience seem to have blinded you to basic risk mitigation.

robomartin 12y ago
No, I read it. You thought my position was comical. And this revealed you simply don't have enough experience to fully comprehend it. And that's OK. My opinions thirty years ago were based on a very different version of reality. I get it. Don't worry about it. Of course this does not mean we WANT our devices bricked. We immediately issued a tech notice to our customers advising to avoid driver upgrades until further notice. We are OK with devices being bricked under a supervised upgrade. We don't want ANY fake and potentially dangerous chips in our equipment. We don't think we have any due to the nature of our supply chain. Yet we can't assume this. Fake devices can be dangerous in more ways than compatibility and functionality issues. For example, they can have substandard ESD characteristics, RF emissions issues, power issues, thermal issues and flat out safety problems. They can represent a huge liability. And so we are planning on setting up a process through which we have customers swap out the board with the potentially questionable chips with a known good board we Fedex in advance. We can rotate a few boards in this fashion and service all of our customers within a few months. If one or more brick before we can get to them we'll FedEx a board right away. In this fashion the bricking acts as an inconvenient fake chip detector. We don't have any high volume consumer products so our perspective is very different from that of a company making consumer cameras or routers.
- zorpner 12y ago
  Ok, I understand you now. My experience has been working with devices which, while potentially dangerous, are voluminous enough that we can't have individual relationships with every end user. While we'd be offering warranties/exchanges if we discovered a fake chip, we'd have no way of guaranteeing that they wouldn't update their controller in the meantime or of forcing them to exchange their board for a newer rev.
  - robomartin 12y ago
    Right. Different perspectives. Things don't always fit neatly into the same box. So some degree I wonder whether FTDI is more of a niche market/small volume product than mass market. If you are making a high volume consumer device it behooves you to optimize cost by using microprocessors with integrated USB capabilities rather than resorting to a USB to serial chip. In other cases the USB to serial approach is attractive because either you have a very small micro or a situation where a full stack OS doesn't exist in the device. As an example, an 8051 derivative would be easier to interface with an FTDI chip. A TI (or whatever) 32 bit micro already comes with USB and there's plenty of support in the way of embedded driver code to make it work. It'd be interesting just how FTDI's market share is segmented. Not sure this information is available anywhere.

by zorpner 12y ago

robomartin 12y ago

No, I read it. You thought my position was comical. And this revealed you simply don't have enough experience to fully comprehend it. And that's OK. My opinions thirty years ago were based on a very different version of reality. I get it. Don't worry about it. Of course this does not mean we WANT our devices bricked. We immediately issued a tech notice to our customers advising to avoid driver upgrades until further notice. We are OK with devices being bricked under a supervised upgrade. We don't want ANY fake and potentially dangerous chips in our equipment. We don't think we have any due to the nature of our supply chain. Yet we can't assume this. Fake devices can be dangerous in more ways than compatibility and functionality issues. For example, they can have substandard ESD characteristics, RF emissions issues, power issues, thermal issues and flat out safety problems. They can represent a huge liability. And so we are planning on setting up a process through which we have customers swap out the board with the potentially questionable chips with a known good board we Fedex in advance. We can rotate a few boards in this fashion and service all of our customers within a few months. If one or more brick before we can get to them we'll FedEx a board right away. In this fashion the bricking acts as an inconvenient fake chip detector. We don't have any high volume consumer products so our perspective is very different from that of a company making consumer cameras or routers.

zorpner 12y ago
Ok, I understand you now. My experience has been working with devices which, while potentially dangerous, are voluminous enough that we can't have individual relationships with every end user. While we'd be offering warranties/exchanges if we discovered a fake chip, we'd have no way of guaranteeing that they wouldn't update their controller in the meantime or of forcing them to exchange their board for a newer rev.
- robomartin 12y ago
  Right. Different perspectives. Things don't always fit neatly into the same box. So some degree I wonder whether FTDI is more of a niche market/small volume product than mass market. If you are making a high volume consumer device it behooves you to optimize cost by using microprocessors with integrated USB capabilities rather than resorting to a USB to serial chip. In other cases the USB to serial approach is attractive because either you have a very small micro or a situation where a full stack OS doesn't exist in the device. As an example, an 8051 derivative would be easier to interface with an FTDI chip. A TI (or whatever) 32 bit micro already comes with USB and there's plenty of support in the way of embedded driver code to make it work. It'd be interesting just how FTDI's market share is segmented. Not sure this information is available anywhere.