3 ms·

Their best course of action: - unbrick devices they bricked, so the chips will at least work with drivers other than theirs - log something to the windows eve

by kabdib 12y ago

Their best course of action: - unbrick devices they bricked, so the chips will at least work with drivers other than theirs - log something to the windows event log about a clone device being detected It's their choice whether they should work with the clone device or not; I would hope they would choose to. I understand their reluctance, but people are going to be only slightly less mad about a device not working than a bricked device. It would be bad for their driver to pop UI warning about a clone device. Drivers that do this make life very, very difficult for devices attached to headless servers (also, I believe it's against the MS WHQL rules).

cnvogel 12y ago
Windows drivers can opt to mark the device they are responsible for as "non operational". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_Manager#Error_Codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_Manager#Error_Codes I think it's the #43 I've seen from time to time: "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems." http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725873(v=ws.10).aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725873(v=ws.10)... They get a special icon in "Device Manager", and, if I remember right, the statusbar-thingie that dances around while newly-connected devices are detected will put up a bubble with an error message.
spc476 12y ago
How would they unbrick a device? By definition, to "brick" is to render the device inoperable. A friend of mine, in the course of his work, bricked a BMW [1]. It took an engineer, flown in [2] to fix the issue. [1] He worked at a company making automobile diagnostic tools for mechanics. He was reflashing the BMW when the power went out. That scrambled the on-board computer system enough to brick the car. [2] South Florida (Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area) I'm sure the German engineer wasn't all that upset.
- kabdib 12y ago
  To misquote The Princess Bride: "This device isn't bricked. It's just mostly bricked. There's a difference." The device is still there, and it will talk, there's just no matching driver in the system for it now. So you add PID=0x0000 to your existing driver (I think this is just an edit to the INF file on Windows) and sniff the device to see if it's one you've likely (semi) bricked, and make the attempt. You own the VID, so this operation should be safe in your namespace. Brickness is a measure of the user's ability and motivation to restore a device. I've worked on systems where you have to unsolder really tiny devices in order to unbrick. It's a continuum of inconvenience, really. To most users, the evil FTDI driver made a brick because it was beyond their skill to do the repair (hey, you can write a driver for PID=0x0000 any time you want to, oaky?)

by kabdib 12y ago

cnvogel 12y ago

Windows drivers can opt to mark the device they are responsible for as "non operational". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_Manager#Error_Codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_Manager#Error_Codes I think it's the #43 I've seen from time to time: "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems." http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725873(v=ws.10).aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725873(v=ws.10)... They get a special icon in "Device Manager", and, if I remember right, the statusbar-thingie that dances around while newly-connected devices are detected will put up a bubble with an error message.

spc476 12y ago

How would they unbrick a device? By definition, to "brick" is to render the device inoperable. A friend of mine, in the course of his work, bricked a BMW [1]. It took an engineer, flown in [2] to fix the issue. [1] He worked at a company making automobile diagnostic tools for mechanics. He was reflashing the BMW when the power went out. That scrambled the on-board computer system enough to brick the car. [2] South Florida (Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area) I'm sure the German engineer wasn't all that upset.

kabdib 12y ago
To misquote The Princess Bride: "This device isn't bricked. It's just mostly bricked. There's a difference." The device is still there, and it will talk, there's just no matching driver in the system for it now. So you add PID=0x0000 to your existing driver (I think this is just an edit to the INF file on Windows) and sniff the device to see if it's one you've likely (semi) bricked, and make the attempt. You own the VID, so this operation should be safe in your namespace. Brickness is a measure of the user's ability and motivation to restore a device. I've worked on systems where you have to unsolder really tiny devices in order to unbrick. It's a continuum of inconvenience, really. To most users, the evil FTDI driver made a brick because it was beyond their skill to do the repair (hey, you can write a driver for PID=0x0000 any time you want to, oaky?)