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| Counterfeit parts.. |
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| peter-h:
Nobody would buy from Digikey (or Mouser, Farnell, etc) in production. Their prices for say 1k are roughly 2x higher than from proper distributors. I use Mouser a lot but only where price doesn't matter. However the "proper" distis (Avnet Future etc) have zero service. It is quite impossible to ask them for an 0805 resistor 100R 1%. They simply have no idea. You have to give them a P/N and then they may be able to find that one, or equivalents. So every time we buy passives from any of these, we have this silly game where they have no idea whether they sell resistors or chocolate bars. Mouser still do have a clue, but importantly they have a website which shows the actual parts and prices. |
| Mr Evil:
The worst fakes I have had were fake UK plugs from eBay. Among other dangerous flaws, they came with the fuses shown in the photo, which have poorly fitting end-caps, and you can even see a bit of fuse wire sticking out from the one on the bottom left. I reported the seller to eBay and trading standards, but sadly they are still selling them. --- Quote from: peter-h on January 31, 2020, 08:27:05 am ---[FTDI] are entitled to scupper fake manufacturers by not supporting the differences in the fake chips, in the drivers. --- End quote --- If all they did was not support the fakes then that might be acceptable, but they effectively destroyed completely innocent end-users' property. They make ncie hardware, but after they did that I decided to never buy anything from them ever again. |
| Cerebus:
--- Quote from: peter-h on January 31, 2020, 08:27:05 am ---They are entitled to scupper fake manufacturers by not supporting the differences in the fake chips, in the drivers. --- End quote --- Yes, but they are not entitled to write drivers that deliberately disable parts on other people's products. That's what they did, and people who had, unbeknownst to them, fake FTDI chips make it into the supply chain had their boards disabled by FTDI's drivers. Not simply, "no that's a fake, I'll print an error message and abort" but "that's a fake, I'll deliberately go out of my way to alter its registers to make it never work again". They deliberately damaged other people's property with malice aforethought. It is literally criminal behaviour, and FTDI were very lucky not to get their collars felt. See Criminal damage in English law. Certainly no sane person would choose to use products from a company who think it's OK to commit the criminal act of trashing their customer's property. I used to specify FTDI's parts, I have not bought or specified an FTDI part since the whole sorry affair came to light even though they would often be the best, if not the cheapest, part to specify. They could have chosen to handle the issue fairly by simply getting their drivers to fail gracefully, they did not and opted to take a course that any reasonable person would have known was wrong. I do not believe in encouraging their sort of arrogant, selfish behaviour by specifying their parts. |
| vwestlife:
I got an Intel 8087 chip from China on eBay that is obviously fake because it shows a copyright date of 1978, when the real 8087 chip wasn't introduced until 1980. But it seems to work identically to a real one. |
| peter-h:
I really doubt somebody designed a functional 8087 replica. It's a massive digital design project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8087 Far more likely these fake 8087s are real ones, recovered from scrap boards, or subspec ones marked with a higher spec number, or some old stock somebody found and maybe "repainted". I recall seeing fake Intersil 7107s in 1980 but a chip like that is pretty easy to design. |
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