Hilarious email from my assembly subcontractor

[Rick Law]

Hi Mike,
I need your help if you can?
We have a customer who has reverse engineered an LED board which is used as a fire effect, the original board was made up with conventional LED's and they have redesigned using surface mount RGB LED's.
The boards have been assembled however we now have a problem in the fact that they did not think about how to program the board to give it the effect they need. Is this something you could help us out with or guide us to what we would need to do? I have attached some pictures of the board.

(pics of a board with a PIC, a load of LEDs and a couple of ULN2003 drivers)

 

This is eye-opening.

I didn't think someone with the capability of replicating a PCB could be dumb enough not to know that an MCU requires code to work.  I am amazed.

[sokoloff]

This is eye-opening.

I didn't think someone with the capability of replicating a PCB could be dumb enough not to know that an MCU requires code to work.  I am amazed.

I suspect this isn't the first device they've ripped off reverse engineered. "Just match the little white numbers on the little black things and you're good" has worked up until now...

[schmitt trigger]

Unfortunately, they not only reverse engineer a working product, but cost reduce it as well.

Those transient voltage suppressors, don't need them. Why the premium opamp, we have plenty of LM358s. Those film capacitors sure are expensive, substitute them by 'lytics....and so forth.

[sokoloff]

Why the premium opamp, we have plenty of LM358s.

Best of both worlds: get an LM358 with little white markings that match the original part...

[AndyC_772]

You can't make this stuff up can you, absolutely brilliant. I hope the production run wasn't too big 

I hope it was huge. I'd happily write some code that will save a massive pile of kit from landfill, and it's not like it's safety critical or liable to infringe anyone's IP.

I get a pay day, the boards don't have to be scrapped after all, customers get their blinky-blinky light things, and the OEM gets a suitably costly lesson in engineering that they won't forget.

Everybody wins.

[nctnico]

You can't make this stuff up can you, absolutely brilliant. I hope the production run wasn't too big 

I hope it was huge. I'd happily write some code that will save a massive pile of kit from landfill, and it's not like it's safety critical or liable to infringe anyone's IP.

I get a pay day, the boards don't have to be scrapped after all, customers get their blinky-blinky light things, and the OEM gets a suitably costly lesson in engineering that they won't forget.

Everybody wins.

I agree. Sounds like a fun project to me. Every once in 10 times it gets powered on it does the knight rider effect ofcourse 

[Rick Law]

This is eye-opening.

I didn't think someone with the capability of replicating a PCB could be dumb enough not to know that an MCU requires code to work.  I am amazed.

I suspect this isn't the first device they've ripped off reverse engineered. "Just match the little white numbers on the little black things and you're good" has worked up until now...

That people "ripped off reverse engineered" wasn't the surprise to me.  What did surprise me was that the folks who did that was too didn't realize that an MCU needs code to function.

I suppose, it is silly of me to expect thief to be intelligent.

I recall a TV show on dumb things: two or three thugs who tried to rob a car repair shop and was told the manager with the key wouldn't be there till 10am (forgot what time, so I made the 10am part) , so come back later.  The thugs did came back at the suggested time, and the police was waiting...

This is the intelligence of the level of a chicken...

[schmitt trigger]

Poor chickens, it’s not fair to insult them like that.

YouTube is full of dumb crook videos.

[amyk]

My first thought was those bigclivedotcom videos too... and if I remember correctly, he even posted a link to the software for one of them.

Also, you can find plenty of code online for the flame effect already...

[NiHaoMike]

I hope it was huge. I'd happily write some code that will save a massive pile of kit from landfill, and it's not like it's safety critical or liable to infringe anyone's IP.

I get a pay day, the boards don't have to be scrapped after all, customers get their blinky-blinky light things, and the OEM gets a suitably costly lesson in engineering that they won't forget.

Everybody wins.

To add a twist, offer a massively discounted rate if they agree for the code to be open source.

[ttelectronic]

 

[AndyC_772]

To add a twist, offer a massively discounted rate if they agree for the code to be open source.

Why would I do that?

[bson]

Plus they've already ripped off the design which means they're cheap, have limited understanding of the product and won't have a clue about software development so getting anything like a reasonable payment out of them is going to be like squeezing blood out of a stone.

^ this

Plus they ripped off someone else's hardware.  What would make anyone think they'd ever get actually paid for firmware?  Dump 'em.

[sokoloff]

Wire transfer up front before delivery of code solves that problem.

[james_s]

Seems like a potentially fairly easy problem to solve. There's probably some teenager out there who would be happy to write the code for a few hundred bucks. I have friends whose kids are coding by the time they're 5 years old, in the not too distant future consumer level software development could end up being a minimum wage starter gig like flipping burgers as much larger portions of the population learn to do it at a young age and it becomes nothing special.

[StillTrying]

I can't help wondering if they kept calling the PCB assembler complaining that the things don't work.

[Nusa]

Tell them to contact the people who made the original version of the board and negotiate rights to the original software with any modifications necessary.

[Monkeh]

Is the customer treez?

[Berni]

Seems like a potentially fairly easy problem to solve. There's probably some teenager out there who would be happy to write the code for a few hundred bucks. I have friends whose kids are coding by the time they're 5 years old, in the not too distant future consumer level software development could end up being a minimum wage starter gig like flipping burgers as much larger portions of the population learn to do it at a young age and it becomes nothing special.

If the software that's already shipping with some rushd electronics devices today is so bad how bad is it gonna get when a bunch of teenagers write it.

Tho I don't se it happening anytime soon. All the times they tried to teach my schoolmates programming in high school and then university it never worked. Seams like you have to be interested in it to really learn it. With how kids these days seam to have shorter and shorter attention spans I'm guessing it's going to be even more difficult to get them to be interested in programming.

[james_s]

I don't know about that. When I was in school it was only the dweebs who were into computers and did any programming, I knew only a small handful of people even as late as highschool. Now like I mentioned I have several friends with young kids who are already coding, everyone uses computers now and it has lost its stigma. Sure not everyone is going to go on to be a brilliant software developer but with so many more people getting their feet wet at a young age along with a huge push for people to go into STEM education later on there are bound to be a lot of programmers. On top of that look at the software development process these days, so much of it is mobile apps and web pages, various forms of Agile and DevOps have taken over, nobody cares about quality anymore, just ship it now, fix it "later" with frequent or even continuous releases. It's set up for a race to the bottom where combined with increasingly powerful hardware writing good code is seen as less and less important.

Now there are areas that are still going to require skilled developers - medical devices, avionics, safety critical stuff, but that's a relatively small portion of the jobs.