Sparkfun Splits with Adafruit

[EEVblog]

Anyone know what happened here? 

https://www.sparkfun.com/official-response

EDIT: I didn't know Phil from Adafruit had already posted about this here:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/open-source-teensy-compatible-what-features-do-you-want/?topicseen
Best to leave that thread to technical discussion of the clone, and this thread for the drama.

Official Response to Comments Made in a Public Forum
Page Published January 7, 2026


Due to recent activities that are in direct violation of our Code of Conduct, which is publicly available on our website, SparkFun has determined that it can no longer transact with Adafruit Industries. Please see the official communication we sent to Adafruit below. Without oversharing, recent violations include:

Sending and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material to SparkFun employees, former employees and customers
Inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter
We understand this may be frustrating. From time to time, we have to make difficult business decisions and this decision was made after thoughtful consideration. We wish Adafruit the best in future endeavors. Please note, SparkFun continues to embrace our strong reseller network - for SparkFun-original products, Teensy, and a multitude of other products. Please see our distributor map below.

Update: January 14, 2026

Aside from directing to this official statement, SparkFun has not made any public posts, comments, or submissions about this situation on external forums or platforms. Any suggestion otherwise is incorrect. This statement is our only public communication on the matter. We are focused on moving forward and continuing to serve our customers and community.

[EEVblog]

Response from Phil from Adafruit:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46616488

hi, phil here — post on adafruit here: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...
i’ll stop back and answer anything (sparkfun will not?).

sparkfun is the exclusive maker and distributor of the closed-source teensy and informed us we will not be able to purchase the teensy. this happened after i sent an email reporting the founder, nate, for multiple harassing actions directed at limor, including behavior by him and a former employee.

instead of addressing that, they decided to kill the messenger, me, and also cut us off from teensy.

so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters, we are doing an open-source alternative. so customers are not stranded, and this is not a supply chain emergency for us. looking forward to seeing which one delights customers more.

as much as nate wants to continue trying to damage limor’s business and adafruit by scraping our site, and now potentially not paying royalties owed after more than a decade of consistent payments, that’s nothing new. it’s a business strategy to cut others out, not a mystery or a “private drama.”

this is exactly why we do open source. when a closed product or exclusive channel is used as leverage, the correct response is to remove the leverage.

sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.

ask away!

[EEVblog]

Adafruit are now replacing the Teensy with the Freensy.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teensy-at-adafruit/

[nctnico]

Where there is smoke, there is fire. And it takes two to tango so there probably is enough blame to go around. 

[thm_w]

Adafruit are now replacing the Teensy with the Freensy.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teensy-at-adafruit/

As discussed in this thread: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/open-source-teensy-compatible-what-features-do-you-want/?topicseen

RP2350 would not be a drop in replacement for the MCU being used in that product (MIMXRT1062). There are plenty of already existing RP2350 boards from adafruit, so if someone was going to move to a new processor they could probably use one of those boards.

I'm not sure why they can't just make a direct clone of the product, anyone know? https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/schematic.html

edit: some explanation in the yc link above

   
ptorrone

hi, great question. we have to start with something and while the RP2350 is not going to beat a 600mhz m7 it is much less expensive, fast to get, has lots of nifty support libraries available, and will definitely do better than the teensy 3.2 which many folks loved so much (and was discontinued during the chip shortage). this is also a great time to add things that we always wanted in the teensy: SWD debug, built in 8 MB storage, lipoly battery charging, open source bootloader, open hardware design. stuff like CAN is supported via PIO (https://github.com/KevinOConnor/can2040), as is USB host on any two adjacent pins. M33 has FPU, and the dormant/RTC mode for the RP2350 is 10uA (see https://www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-pico/...). other 'teensiriffic' things like NeoPixel DMA support is well supported by PIO on the RP2350. as well as I2S audio.

as for the bootloader chip: we don't want to trade one closed-single-source component for another. if we're going to make something it should be fully open source as much as we can!

finally, for teensyduino libraries that you love: there's no reason they cant be ported (we did an audio port for the samd51) - which specific library are you referring to?

[SiliconWizard]

Yes, Teensy boards are not actually "open hardware", so while they provide the schematics, you can't sell a product based on these without the author's consent, and it's probably not going to happen here.

[aargee]

I really wish that people representing organisations use proper punctuation, unfortunately responses like Phil’s doesn’t do much for credibility in my eyes (that’s in MY EYES 🙂)

[Smokey]

Yes, Teensy boards are not actually "open hardware", so while they provide the schematics, you can't sell a product based on these without the author's consent, and it's probably not going to happen here.

Products designed with dev boards as major components are pretty sketchy to begin with. 

I'm interested to hear what went down here though.  My first pic programmer was from sparkfun when it was still run from his college dorm. 

[sleemanj]

High school level drama to me. 

https://digipres.club/@discatte/115588660312186707

Got bored and quit reading half way through.

[asmi]

Lol I have better things to do with my time than to read this crap. I didn't buy anything from either of those companies for many years though, so I don't really care who is villain here, as far as I'm concerned they both don't look good for dumping a durty laundry onto public.

High school level drama to me. 

Yeah, and not even a very good one at that...

[coppercone2]

pissing off suppliers is bad business practice. Distributors do marketing and possibly some ware housing work and should work to keep suppliers. I have a feeling that AI is not critical towards the operation of a supplier (save for possibly reducing overhead with likely a severe penalty to quality and reputation*).

To me it seems that the distributor got freaked out that their latest scheme towards reducing overhead was being criticized and reacted in a childlike manner. Anyway, in most engineering companies the marketing department is easy to piss off, I don't think its even a pop corn moment. Every good designer is probably going to be fighting marketing/distribution because they are non technical (apart from some logistics), usually the only thing you do is fight to keep features and product quality, prevent the product being sent in paper envelopes, etc

So someone got in a fight with a big ego MBA that overvalued themselves news at 11

b2b = bullshit 2 bullshit

and when someone starts harassing you online like that, they really put 'distribution' in distribution, like the distribution that gets you charged lol


*some how the recent trend of rich people shaking their fist at customers is not making me confident, I don't think this will convince people

[EEVblog]

High school level drama to me. 

The community seems split, with a about half saying they'll never buy from Sparkfun again, and the other half saying they'll never buy from Adafruit again 

[EEVblog]

I really wish that people representing organisations use proper punctuation, unfortunately responses like Phil’s doesn’t do much for credibility in my eyes (that’s in MY EYES 🙂)

That's just Phil's style. If you get an email from him it'll be in all lower case. I presume for efficiency or something like that.

[EEVblog]

Yes, Teensy boards are not actually "open hardware", so while they provide the schematics, you can't sell a product based on these without the author's consent

As in a final product that the board is used in as the processor?
If so, that's messed up.

[EEVblog]

Presumably from Phil with some more detail:
https://x.com/SpicyNoodles2/status/2011611259247198311

[EEVblog]

Lots of detail:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/15/sparkfun_cuts_ties_with_adafruit/

[NiHaoMike]

Yes, Teensy boards are not actually "open hardware", so while they provide the schematics, you can't sell a product based on these without the author's consent, and it's probably not going to happen here.

How big is the Teensy business anyways? Would it be practical for some open source friendly business to buy them and release everything under proper open source licenses?

[wilfred]

This reminded me of a '90s Australian satire "Frontline" on the state current affairs programs of the time.

cued to the punchline. https://youtu.be/2fHdTdC2kOo?si=MpOFLFfwvBij64Be&t=180

[temperance]

I hate them both. Typical US based robbers. The intention both companies had from the start looked fake. When the battle is about supply chain exclusivity and trademarks, they both failed their own narrative.

Fookin maker bullshit.

[Buriedcode]

I don't get why people are so invested... I wouldn't trust any product that used something which is essentially a great prototyping tool.  They're great for development, learning, personal projects etc.. but if your business is gravely affected by something like a Teensy not being open source, you might want to go back to product development..

I've ordered from both, although spaarkfun was about a decade ago.  Can't say I have any complaints with either except perhaps some shoddy coding in AF's (and to some extent sparkfuns) libraries - but they were provided for free, and go the job done, and you really shouldn't be relying on those libraries for your business anyway - that isn't what they are for.

I was going to google this, but then I realised I don't really care.  Maybe its my age but if it doesn't affect my business, or hobbies, meh.

[tineibous]

Giving my 2 unwanted cents.

While I bought(and probably will keep buying when needed) from both companies, I find that all of them are at fault there, they're 2 big companies dealing with that like it's some high school facebook drama.

My only "issue" with it is that pt doesn't get the full picture of what a teensy is, his Freensy isn't even closer to a Teensy replacement, it just have the same form factor. Teensy supports more protocols(CAN-FD for example), has more interfaces and is way faster, besides that a good part of teensy is the eco-system that pjrc builty around it and the Freensy isn't faster or has more interfaces than the Teensy.

IMO Teensy will keep selling and being one of the best MCU until someone do something equals or better than it, Teensy is already expensive, people who buys it doesn't look that hard at the price, so doing it cheaper and worse won't move the needle

[temperance]

IMO Teensy will keep selling and being one of the best MCU until...

So you slap a controller onto a board with a bootloader and people call it the best thing next to sliced bread. This is just overpriced rubbish. For that money you can get an ST dev board or any other ARM board for perhaps 9...15 bucks including an EMULATOR.

[nctnico]

IMO Teensy will keep selling and being one of the best MCU until...

So you slap a controller onto a board with a bootloader and people call it the best thing next to sliced bread. This is just overpriced rubbish. For that money you can get an ST dev board or any other ARM board for perhaps 9...15 bucks including an EMULATOR.

But then you are stuck with ST and their crappy HAL, poor documentation and left on your own to figure things out. Keep in mind you are also paying for the software environment / ecosystem which should save you development time. It is not just the hardware. IMHO the latter is where Adafruit is taking the wrong turn by trying to compete on price with their Freensy idea (if it ever sees daylight). But then again, too many people only look at costs of hardware because that is easy to quantify. In reality software development costs typically dwarf hardware development costs so if you can drive software development costs down, you can save a lot of money. For one-off / low volume products the price of the hardware doesn't even move the needle when looking at the total cost of a project.

[asmi]

But then you are stuck with ST and their crappy HAL, poor documentation and left on your own to figure things out. Keep in mind you are also paying for the software environment / ecosystem which should save you development time. It is not just the hardware. IMHO the latter is where Adafruit is taking the wrong turn by trying to compete on price with their Freensy idea (if it ever sees daylight). But then again, too many people only look at costs of hardware because that is easy to quantify. In reality software development costs typically dwarf hardware development costs so if you can drive software development costs down, you can save a lot of money. For one-off / low volume products the price of the hardware doesn't even move the needle when looking at the total cost of a project.

You miss the point of this product. It's designed for hobbyists, and for them software development is not a cost, but the entire point of a project - so much so that often the actual process of working on a project is more important (or at least as important) than the final result.

[nctnico]

But then you are stuck with ST and their crappy HAL, poor documentation and left on your own to figure things out. Keep in mind you are also paying for the software environment / ecosystem which should save you development time. It is not just the hardware. IMHO the latter is where Adafruit is taking the wrong turn by trying to compete on price with their Freensy idea (if it ever sees daylight). But then again, too many people only look at costs of hardware because that is easy to quantify. In reality software development costs typically dwarf hardware development costs so if you can drive software development costs down, you can save a lot of money. For one-off / low volume products the price of the hardware doesn't even move the needle when looking at the total cost of a project.

You miss the point of this product. It's designed for hobbyists, and for them software development is not a cost, but the entire point of a project - so much so that often the actual process of working on a project is more important (or at least as important) than the final result.

I don't think you can park any dev board straight into the hobbyist corner. IMHO that is too simplistic. These boards are also used a lot for doing commercial rapid prototyping & proofs of concept. And you might find such boards in products as well. Think of cheap GPSDOs run by DIP form-factor microcontroller boards. More specifically to Teensy: there is a reason you can buy the accompaning license chips in order to use the platform in a product. There is a demand to do that. Now I don't know how much sales this generates, but the availability says that there is a demand for the Teensy platform for use in commercial products. All in all it would not surprise me if it turns out most sales come from commercial parties, not hobbyists.