FTDI chip only outputs 00's? Has anybody also seen this?

[nctnico]

Well, since this is a not-seen-before behavior on the part of FTDI divers/chips/lookalikes

http://zeptobars.com/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supereal%20this%20deep-down

Known behaviour from more than two years ago. How old is his driver?

For who didn't read the article: older FTDI drivers seem to send '0's when a fake chip is detected. IMHO this leads to the following conclusion: Farnell sold fake chips or FTDI's fake chip detection algorithm doesn't work correctly.

[Kilrah]

or FTDI's fake chip detection algorithm doesn't work correctly.

Now if it failed on genuine chips that would truly become hilarious 

[nctnico]

I have used the FTDI FT232RL-REEL from farnell, order code 1146032. http://nl.farnell.com/ftdi/ft232rl-reel/ic-usb-to-uart-smd-28ssop/dp/1146032?ost=1146032&selectedCategoryId=&categoryName=Alle+categorie%C3%ABn&categoryNameResp=Alle%2Bcategorie%25C3%25ABn

Oddly enough this product is currently out of stock until the end of june 2016!

[wraper]

Probably because OP wrote farnell about the issue and they decided that better be safe than sorry. As of OP, I don't see any effort to really check if they are fake or not, only opening another tread crying that FTDI is bad and he needs to chose something else.

[cdwijs]

Probably because OP wrote farnell about the issue and they decided that better be safe than sorry. As of OP, I don't see any effort to really check if they are fake or not, only opening another tread crying that FTDI is bad and he needs to chose something else.

I have ordered the chips a few weeks ago, they were already out of stock at that moment.
Kind regards,
Cedric

[westfw]

http://zeptobars.com/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supereal%20this%20deep-down
Known behaviour from more than two years ago. How old is his driver?

huh.  According to the article, the "send zeros" behavior was the FIRST ftdi driver countermeasure
This was followed by the "brick the chip" behavior.
And (currently) the "readable string" behavior.  (which was SUGGESTED by the customer in that initial report!)

Does anyone have a list that attaches driver behavior to driver version numbers?  (Somehow, these "counterfeit mitigation changes" aren't mentioned in the FTDI release notes!)
(and I guess the OP is running a short-lived 2y-old driver?  Or is there a newer version that goes back to the zero-based behavior?)

[f4eru]

FTDI is unreliable shit at this point. Use the better alternatives.

[Koen]

Hello, it's been a week, have you received an answer from Farnell ?

[cdwijs]

Farnell has asked me to send the chips back to them, and offered to send replacements.

Kind regards,
Cedric

[bazsa56]

Hope you can update us on how this whole thing turns out eventually.

We migrated away from the ft232rl recently, however some older designs might still use the chip and we woudn't want to get hit with a clone batch. Would be a major PIA. We do order stuff from Farnell among other reputable places. I can see that they do not have stock of the chip however.

[Boomerang]

This is really really bad for Farnell as well !!!

They cannot guarantee that what you buy is what you will get eventually!

[Ian.M]

Please take good closeup photos of the chips and original packaging label(s) before returning them and post them here.

[nctnico]

Please take good closeup photos of the chips and original packaging label(s) before returning them and post them here.

+1
I'm very interested in what the top & bottom of the chips look like!

[wraper]

This is really really bad for Farnell as well !!!

They cannot guarantee that what you buy is what you will get eventually!

OP so far made zero effort to check if they are really counterfeit. So it is completely unknown if they really are, and if vendor should be blamed.

[bazsa56]

Please take good closeup photos of the chips and original packaging label(s) before returning them and post them here.

+1
I'm very interested in what the top & bottom of the chips look like!

+2

Would be very interested in the chips. Most of the time you can clearly see that the marking on the top left is somewhat different then on a genuine. I do have 3 old adapters though which still work with new drivers but look sort of different then the ones we got from farnell or mouser, so who really knows what is going on with these...

[Janne]

I have some FL232's on order from Farnell. Will be interesting to see what I receive when their "receive your order the next day"-package arrives some time late next week..

[adx]

This has happened to me (zeroes). I lost 3 days because of it, despite being burned by the PL2303 fakes affair. I really need to start my own blog and have a whinge so I'll leave that (mostly) to there!

The upshot is the chip looks like a fake (with the pin 1 scallop offset towards pin 1), it's in an Arduino Nano "compatible" bought from eBay in 2013 when the price was high enough to not be suspicious, and I had no idea FTDI chips had been faked (and it worked fine). Hours of looking up error messages revealed nothing about these fakes. It probably happened when I upgraded to the latest Arduino, which bundles the latest FTDI driver. However after reverting to a 2007 driver,  it's still outputting zeroes only, which implies to me it's been bricked to actually do that, or there is some residual driver component on my systems (all XP, at least that's all I've tested on) which I didn't manage to delete. I assumed it was the baud rate or some USB driver problem, and didn't twig to the fact that the comms might have been deliberately sabotaged, so along with ICSP programmer debugging, and the original battle (trying to get what I thought were tested devices working over RDP), it's taken a long time. I'm a long-time-ago FTDI customer (2005) and I don't like being deliberately sabotaged in undocumented ways, whatever their problems are.

I probably shouldn't spend more time on the thing, but if I get around to confirming whether the device or driver is bricked on a virginal machine, I'll post back here. There are a couple of reports on the web about fake chips or the FTDI driver putting out zeroes so I think it is "a thing".

- Antony.

(PS I don't know what happened to my account, probably because I hadn't posted before - can't remember. But signed up again.)

Edit: Added "compatible" to the Nano.

[adx]

Well that was quick. Just confirming the fake chip works with version 2.0.0.0 of the FTDI drivers reports as being from 2006 installed on a FTDI-virginal XP laptop. Also, on an 'affected' XP machine, the latest version of the driver I had that comes with an uninstaller (FTDIUNIN.exe), version 1.0.2176.0 reports as being from 2005 (although the driver files are dated 2012), works after using the uninstaller then installing that driver, so I had just done a bad job of deleting the files (there are various files, not just ftser2k.sys). So the "zeroes" problem is, as this thread suggests, a function of a driver.

Should I be posting this info? In an ideal world I would replace the chip with a genuine FT232 after having been warned by FTDI's nag screen or whatever and/or just found some genuine product and moved on. But FTDI deliberately and secretively made sure they cost me as much money and time as they could. Would I have done the same thing in their situation? I'd certainly think about it, but I don't think I would be able to bring myself to hate on my customers (or potential customers) that much. It's just the corporate way.

[Rerouter]

Its a fair thing to post, at my work a $4000 tool was knocked out when then fake chip in it was knocked out, like the op even the company that made it wasn't aware they had a bad batch,

In our case the device is epoxy sealed, so without swapping drivers we have zero chance of ever replacing the chip,

[nctnico]

Its a fair thing to post, at my work a $4000 tool was knocked out when then fake chip in it was knocked out, like the op even the company that made it wasn't aware they had a bad batch,

Just wondering: how did the manufacturer of that $4000 tool react?

[Rerouter]

mainly very confused, and constantly telling us we had somehow bricked it, It wasn't until we data logged what was happening (had local echo, which was lucky), and dug up threads like this that they even believed us,

We never got to speak directly to any people involved with the design or R&D, so i think they may still think we are spinning a tall tale.

[Kilrah]

Also, on an 'affected' XP machine, the latest version of the driver I had that comes with an uninstaller (FTDIUNIN.exe), version 1.0.2176.0 reports as being from 2005 (although the driver files are dated 2012), works after using the uninstaller then installing that driver, so I had just done a bad job of deleting the files (there are various files, not just ftser2k.sys).

Look at Driver Store Explorer, it lets you remove cached drivers for good.

Particularly useful for owners of Nvidia graphics cards who regularly update their drivers as well, since each version installs separately leaving the old one there, and each uses about 4-500MB of drive space.

[adx]

Look at Driver Store Explorer, it lets you remove cached drivers for good.

Not for XP apparently, though it looks useful.

I use "Device Remover" - it can be slow to log all devices (including unattached ones) but gives a good list of weird drivers that have been installed on the system and every USB device that's been plugged in since its early days (which for mine, is 2001, it replaced a system that had been 'continuously upgraded' since 1988!). From memory one of my hives under Windows 2000 had grown too big, it helped me fix that.

However it didn't solve my FTDI problem (I'm pretty sure I tried it). I just did a poor job of removing the FTDI crud.