Sparkfun Splits with Adafruit

[negativ3]

what's so special about the Teensy compared to the thousand other micro-on-aboard solution?

Hi, Paul here... the guy who designed Teensy.  I'd say 2 things make Teensy valuable.

1: Much like Arduino, simplified software, tutorials, support and community make it more accessible to a wide range of people.  If you're a seasoned engineer, as I'm sure most people on this forum are, maybe those features aren't so appealing?  But those features do appeal to a lot of people, as you can imagine from the success of Arduino.  Those features do enable people with little or no engineering background to achieve electronic projects.  Teensy serves a small niche within that market, which is why not nearly as many people know it so well as Arduino, but the general concept is pretty similar.

2: Teensy offers substantially higher performance than most other maker-focused boards.  We also pour a lot of work into optimized software libraries.  Again, if you're a seasoned engineer this may not appeal, as you would select the chip that meets each project's requirements and you probably craft all your own code, or you work with a firmware team that does.  But if you can try to imagine being in the shoes of an ambitious maker who discovers their project plans need a lot of CPU power or USB bandwidth or a dozen serial ports communicating simultaneously, having *any* board available which can meet those needs with software they can actually use makes the difference between achieving their goals versus having to scale back their dream due to hardware limitations.  Teensy serves a tiny niche within the market market, for people who need the accessibility you'd associate with Arduino, but they also need much more horsepower than the more common boards provide.


Teensy does have a closed source bootloader.  The reason is simple business reality of operating a tiny company serving a small niche within a large (or larger anyway) market with several large (or comparatively larger) companies, Adafruit, SparkFun, Seeed Studios, Waveshare, etc.  Had we made everything 100% open source, those companies and later no-name Asian vendors would have widely cloned the hardware as soon as it showed value.  We could have adopted a business model similar to all those other companies, but that's not who I am.  I love this tiny niche, tackling the complex hardware first, writing non-blocking DMA-based libraries, and directly helping people with their ambitious projects.

Teensy wasn't actually the first maker-focused board to offer a 32 bit MCU with Arduino API software.  That honor belongs to Leaflabs Maple.  They poured almost 2 solid years into writing a really good USB stack from scratch.  I did the same for Teensy, a few times.  Not long after their code became stable, their hardware was widely cloned, undercutting their sales.  They later moved on to a software consultancy model.  Today the hardware benefiting from those years of software engineering work is know as "Blue Pill" and "Black Pill" from no-name Asian vendors.

Much as I would love to make everything 100% open source, and we have indeed published all the code that gets built into people's firmware under MIT or MIT-like license to allow maximum freedom, the reality of the "maker market" is the sort of business we have run for Teensy over the years, where I personally develop higher performance libraries and directly answer people's questions nearly every day, simply wouldn't be possible under the 100% open source model.

I know this is controversial and many open source enthusiasts would disagree.  To those folks I would point to the story of Maple, as well as this current situation where Adafruit would very much like to make a product to compete with Teensy.  Their answer is not to invest that sort of engineering work to make a new product on-par with Teensy, but rather just repackage Raspberry Pi Pico.  From a business perspective their decision does makes sense, since this really is only for a small niche of the market.


Comments have been made about NDAs.  We did indeed sign a NDA with NXP.  The chip's security features are the main thing covered by the NDA.  Today Teensy comes in a standard version which doesn't support the security stuff, and a "lockable" version which offers encrypted firmware and secure firmware update process.  The lockable version would not have been possible without the security info NXP provided under NDA.

Most of the rest of the chip is documented like other microcontrollers.  If you find the Teensy products pages, either at PJRC or SparkFun, scroll down to the tech info where you can find the 3500 page reference manual which has over 1000 annotations added to document how it's actually used in Teensy, as well as quirks of the chip we have learned along the way.


As Teensy grew, manufacturing and selling it ourselves with a small team and 2 local contract manufacturers became just too much for us.  Starting in March 2025, we partnered with SparkFun Electronics to take over manufacturing and sales.

I had hoped to spend much more time on software and eventually get back into tutorial videos, which I had done briefly before the business started to grow in 2015.  Sadly, 2025 turned out to be a rough year.  But in recent months things were really starting to look up.  I've been getting more excited about so many software "initiatives" I've wanted to pursue over the years.

I certainly didn't have getting caught in drama between Adafruit and SparkFun on my 2026 bingo card, especially not drama so surreal.

Why the Teensy was chosen as the bun in this very public bun fight seems opaque.
Must be the only business connection between the two companies.

[Svgeesus]

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.

Plenty of people sell products that integrate a Teensy board. Some people make and/or sell their own Teensy variants, using the PJRC boot chip.

What differentiates a Teensy from any random ARM breakout chip is the Arduino-compatible Teensyduino software ecosystem and the level of support. If someone isn't planning to use any of that, then they can make their own product without needing anything from PJRC, including "permission".

[nctnico]

Gotta say he has a somewhat unusual way of introducing himself to a new forum. First sentence:

limor and i can’t purchase teensys from sparkfun anymore

Who are you, bro?

Yeah, I must say I found it pretty odd, bordering on rude and completely without any context.

Unfortunately some business owners are like that. In their mind everyone on the world knows about their company.

[tszaboo]

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.

For commercial product made in any volume it's much cheaper to spin a custom board. This is not a complex SoC with fast tricky memories and other complex high-speed stuff - it's just an MCU even if a fast one, so a few decoupling caps and a crystal is all you need to get it up and running.

For you and me that would be the way to go but I've come across quite a few electronics engineers for whom that is too much to ask. They rather design a double layer carrier board and be done with it. Keep in mind that the processor on the Teensy is a BGA and for many dealing with QFN and 0402 parts is scary as hell already. For example: I've had long winded discussions with an electronics engineer not wanting to do a board respin because he had specialists do the layout for the DC-DC converters (simple step-down converter chips which need a diode, inductor and some capacitors).

IDK, most of my time is spent on certifications, communication with other engineers for injection moulding, managing the team or having meetings with suppliers about prices, or managing my managers  . And the end result is a product. I really don't know where is the actual effort in these boards, because layout or schematic looks like a weeklong work, for boards that have 10x to a 100x more components than these "USB port with a micro and some headers" boards.
And yes, I get why some engineers would use them, that week might be too much or you don't want to pay setup costs for a pick and place machine, so buying 10 of these makes sense.

[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.

Plenty of people sell products that integrate a Teensy board. Some people make and/or sell their own Teensy variants, using the PJRC boot chip.

What differentiates a Teensy from any random ARM breakout chip is the Arduino-compatible Teensyduino software ecosystem and the level of support. If someone isn't planning to use any of that, then they can make their own product without needing anything from PJRC, including "permission".

It looks like a couple people haven't understood my sentence, so I'm making it clearer.
By "selling a product based on these", "these" was refering to the Teensy board schematics, not to the boards themselves. I wasn't talking about basing a product off a Teensy board, but selling dev boards based on the Teensy schematics copied as is. Just like anything with a copyright, unless the author explicitely allows you to do this, either from a direct statement from them or for a more general license, you just can't.

As a corollary, just because a schematic is released doesn't mean it's open hardware. Probably obvious, but just mentioning it.

Now you can always recreate what's on a Teensy board without making a carbon copy of it and so without copyright infringement, as it's not like it's rocket science, but if those dev boards sell, it's precisely because there are people who either can't or don't want to bother recreating the same features from scratch and like having the boards as some kind of self-contained component.

From PJRC's standpoint, the only way they can make any money that I can think of is to be able to control who makes those boards so they can get their share.

[UnijunctionTransistor]

If I want to follow a good drama, I ‘ll stick to the Royal families. All of them, not only the British Crown.

[TheOldCrow]

    In business, if and when a contract ends or is otherwise terminated both parties should just go their own way.
Drama in maker subculture project hardware doesn't require someone at fault: it is the clash of egos that is disrupting
the development stack. Adafruit has its own line card to manage, adding a widget that sort of looks like another brand's
device in response to a lockout isn't in their best interest. For every product you add to your catalog, you have to maintain
it. Spend that time on the core product lines, not grousing at a failed partnership.

[jpanhalt]

For every product you add to your catalog, you have to maintain
it.

Logic might suggest that, but for what may be viewed as commodities, e.g., cigarettes, it's been shown that market share is proportional to the number of brands you offer.  Leggett and Myers tobacco company showed that decades ago.  While not commodities like cigarettes, in their markets where there is overlap, adding another "brand" can be advantageous.

The best solution is to include a non-disparagement clause in every contract.  It's like a prenup, which is becoming quite common in new marriages in America.  Apparently and sadly, that was not in their contract

[thm_w]

No their intentions were never "fake", and not sure how a bit of harmless drama reflects that.

Both companies are all about open source. One company releases closed source stuff and let the community do some of the work. (Like the GDB implementation for the Teensy because the hardware lacks an JTAG/SWD header. PJRC benefits from this community effort.) And why exactly is the bootloader closed source?

Sparkfun: you take a generic, off-the-shelf component (the WS2812B), place it on a piece of FR4, and used trademarking to create a proprietary identity for a public-domain circuit. Meanwhile, you teach the children how to sodder cubes with LED's and make sure they understand they are now entitled to be part of The highly regarded open source community.

The Maker shite crew: we strongly advocate open source initiatives, but for our self the rules only apply if it fits our own busyness.

Its a product line they happen to make and sell for someone else. If it was up to them, they'd open source the whole thing https://github.com/sparkfun
The one person you can complain about this has posted in this thread already (Paul) and explained his reasoning. Everything else you've said is overly cynicism without reasoning, major old man yells at clouds vibes.

[Smokey]

Apart from the sparkfun/adaftuit squabble, the teensy stuff is a essentially a non-issue. 

Anyone that needs one can still buy it from sparkfun.  Note that if you bought one before from adaftuit you were still buying one from sparkfun.  Same deal.

If you wanted to make your own product based on the circuit, the schematic is still available. 

Unless I'm missing something, Nothing is fundamentally different.

[EEVblog]

Apart from the sparkfun/adaftuit squabble, the teensy stuff is a essentially a non-issue. 

Anyone that needs one can still buy it from sparkfun.  Note that if you bought one before from adaftuit you were still buying one from sparkfun.  Same deal.

If you wanted to make your own product based on the circuit, the schematic is still available. 

Unless I'm missing something, Nothing is fundamentally different.

Correct. It's basically just the human drama that makes it interesting to people.
Adafruit and Sparkfun are two big open source hardware hobby suppliers run by two of the biggest names and influencers in the industry.
They seemed best of buddies before this with practically identical goals, so it's all naturally rather surprising.

[EEVblog]

Teensy does have a closed source bootloader.  The reason is simple business reality of operating a tiny company serving a small niche within a large (or larger anyway) market with several large (or comparatively larger) companies, Adafruit, SparkFun, Seeed Studios, Waveshare, etc.  Had we made everything 100% open source, those companies and later no-name Asian vendors would have widely cloned the hardware as soon as it showed value.  We could have adopted a business model similar to all those other companies, but that's not who I am.  I love this tiny niche, tackling the complex hardware first, writing non-blocking DMA-based libraries, and directly helping people with their ambitious projects.

Teensy wasn't actually the first maker-focused board to offer a 32 bit MCU with Arduino API software.  That honor belongs to Leaflabs Maple.  They poured almost 2 solid years into writing a really good USB stack from scratch.  I did the same for Teensy, a few times.  Not long after their code became stable, their hardware was widely cloned, undercutting their sales.  They later moved on to a software consultancy model.  Today the hardware benefiting from those years of software engineering work is know as "Blue Pill" and "Black Pill" from no-name Asian vendors.

Much as I would love to make everything 100% open source, and we have indeed published all the code that gets built into people's firmware under MIT or MIT-like license to allow maximum freedom, the reality of the "maker market" is the sort of business we have run for Teensy over the years, where I personally develop higher performance libraries and directly answer people's questions nearly every day, simply wouldn't be possible under the 100% open source model.

I know this is controversial and many open source enthusiasts would disagree.  To those folks I would point to the story of Maple, as well as this current situation where Adafruit would very much like to make a product to compete with Teensy.  Their answer is not to invest that sort of engineering work to make a new product on-par with Teensy, but rather just repackage Raspberry Pi Pico.  From a business perspective their decision does makes sense, since this really is only for a small niche of the market.

Thanks for the detailed explanation Paul.
It's very interesting to me why a non open source hardware project would become popular, especially through the likes of Sparkfun and Adafruit. As I was met with either stone cold deathly silence at best , or at worse harsh criticism from their communities when I released my OSHW logo alternative that tried to incorporate closed source options to solve that exact problem the industry was having.



Sparkfun and Adafruit seemed to be tied so intimately to the purest nature of OSHW, i.e. it's either 100% open or GTFO.

[EEVblog]

If people even got it at all. I would recognize "Adafruit" and I would even recognize the founder's nickname, but it's first time I hear her legal name or that she is married.
Maybe it just shows I'm not their customer. Is it expected to care about those things?

The OSHW industry is pretty tight nit here.
Founder of Adafruit LadyAda a.k.a Limor Fried is married to Phil Torrone who founded Hack-a-Day, editor of Make magazine, they have two kids (one just a few weeks old).
Founder of Sparkfun Nathan Seidle is married to Alicia Gibb who is director of the OSHW association.

[iMo]

..it cannot be a bigger drama as when the Beatles split.. 

[SiliconWizard]

Adafruit and Sparkfun are two big open source hardware hobby suppliers run by two of the biggest names and influencers in the industry.
They seemed best of buddies before this with practically identical goals, so it's all naturally rather surprising.

Well, that's precisely what makes me find it not so surprising. Two companies with an equivalent position in the industry  and essentially doing the same thing, those are competitors. IMHO thinking that competitors can keep being best friends forever is a nice story but pretty delusional. Sure it looks here like it's a 100% personal issue only, but that sounds a bit delusional to me.

Try just being "best friends" inside the same company and see how it can go sometimes. So in separate companies that are competitors? Yeah. Business and friendship rarely go well together.

[EEVblog]

Adafruit and Sparkfun are two big open source hardware hobby suppliers run by two of the biggest names and influencers in the industry.
They seemed best of buddies before this with practically identical goals, so it's all naturally rather surprising.

Well, that's precisely what makes me find it not so surprising. Two companies with an equivalent position in the industry  and essentially doing the same thing, those are competitors. IMHO thinking that competitors can keep being best friends forever is a nice story but pretty delusional. Sure it looks here like it's a 100% personal issue only, but that sounds a bit delusional to me.

Try just being "best friends" inside the same company and see how it can go sometimes. So in separate companies that are competitors? Yeah. Business and friendship rarely go well together.

I don't know what their personal relationship is like, but for the longest of time they seemed to have had a pretty symbiotic business relationship that worked well.
Through all the woke stuff (MISO/MOSI etc) and OSWH stuff they seemed in lockstep.

Was the Teensy the only thing that Adfruit resold as a dealer or vice-versa?
If so, as Smokey said, it's a nothingburger from a business perspective, Adafruit was just a reseller of the Sparkfun produced Teensy board.

[floobydust]

The OSHW industry is pretty tight nit here.
Founder of Adafruit LadyAda a.k.a Limor Fried is married to Phil Torrone who founded Hack-a-Day, editor of Make magazine, they have two kids (one just a few weeks old).
Founder of Sparkfun Nathan Seidle is married to Alicia Gibb who is director of the OSHW association.

Is this why OSHW has a stick up its ass? My beef - the originator, the inventor does not get a way to recoup their cash laid out for the H/W, the PCB, the builds.
Yet the company that copies it all, manufactures it - does profit from it. Wow, what an incentive to make OSHW for the masses. Adafruit and Sparkfun are competitors, not buddies.
These people seem to be exploiting those who make the designs open, in the name of nicey nice. This is just my opinion but OSHW needs a way to at least pay off the developer and not be a vampire project wanting ever more developer blood- for free.
I understand the "sweat equity", the labour also given as a freebie "for the masses". But how many hours are put in before wanting to recover some of it? What I see is people otherwise abandon the work, and it gets orphaned. The additional labour for supporting, debugging etc. - they burn out, for free.

I understand the Teensy bootloader being non-open, if that is what the hissy fit is about here.

[EEVblog]

This is just my opinion but OSHW needs a way to at least pay off the developer and not be a vampire project wanting ever more developer blood- for free.

This is a long standing problem that, as I said before, I tried to solve. And I think it was a great solution.
Unfortunately no one at the OSHW Association, nor Sparkfun, nor Adafruit, nor almost any other major player was the least bit interested.

[wilfred]

Much as I would love to make everything 100% open source,

Why make any of it open source if you aren't, or feel you cannot, make it 100% open? With software if there was a closed binary blob that had to be linked into the final executable it would really make the rest unpalatable. Making a commercial product partially closed seems rather pointless if others cannot reproduce it and take it in other directions. Commercial or open seem kind of mutually exclusive.

Not that I know, but how many really successful software or hardware projects are there that aren't fully open? I'd expect the answer to be none.

[PaulStoffregen]

No, the drama which led to SparkFun refusing to engage in future business with Adafruit wasn't about open source.  Or at least what I know of it doesn't seem to have been about open source, and certainly not Teensy.

Talk of open source is coming up now only because the one thing Adafruit was buying from SparkFun which they can't make themselves was Teensy.

I'm not going to comment on the drama, partly because it's not my fight, but mostly because I didn't directly observe any of it.  I only just learned of it a few weeks ago.  Like you, I've only been able to view the aftermath of this conflict and try to piece together some understanding of what actually happened.

But I will point you to the best info I've seen so far, a "Hacker News" headline on January 14 which received over 500 comments.  A Google search for "hacker news adafruit sparkfun" should bring it right up.  Many of those comments are from Adafruit (user "ptorrone" who never types capital letters), so you can get their side of this story.  None are from SparkFun.  Most are just random uninformed opinion.  But some comments appear to be from people who may have knowledge of the drama.  Several cite sources, so if you don't have time to read through 500+ comments, maybe visually scan for links.

Hopefully you can make some sense of all this.  If you do, I'm curious to hear.

[asmi]

The OSHW industry is pretty tight nit here.
Founder of Adafruit LadyAda a.k.a Limor Fried is married to Phil Torrone who founded Hack-a-Day, editor of Make magazine, they have two kids (one just a few weeks old).
Founder of Sparkfun Nathan Seidle is married to Alicia Gibb who is director of the OSHW association.

After reading this: https://oshwa.org/resources/a-resolution-to-redefine-spi-signal-names/ it seems like they are less about open source or hardware, and more about SJW crap like tilting at windmills.

[Smokey]

The OSHW industry is pretty tight nit here.
Founder of Adafruit LadyAda a.k.a Limor Fried is married to Phil Torrone who founded Hack-a-Day, editor of Make magazine, they have two kids (one just a few weeks old).
Founder of Sparkfun Nathan Seidle is married to Alicia Gibb who is director of the OSHW association.

After reading this: https://oshwa.org/resources/a-resolution-to-redefine-spi-signal-names/ it seems like they are less about open source or hardware, and more about SJW crap like tilting at windmills.

I must have missed that specific "resolution" the first time it came around...  I wonder if any of these people regret being attached to this now that it's not so trendy.  While it's mostly generally irrelevant internet people, there are some actual names in there. (did they make that block of text impossible to read on purpose?)

Individual Endorsements
Abram Connelly Adam Benzion (Edge Impulse) Alethea Flowers (Winterbloom) Alicia Gibb (OSHWA) Aloba Olalekann Andreas G. Andreou (Johns Hopkins University) Andrew Quitmeyer A.M. Rowsell (Tindie Blog) Azubuine Cyril Caleb Eastman Christian Lilienthal Cyril Azubuine Prof. David Harris, Harvey Mudd College Drew Fustini Edna Jonsson (Todda Industries) Ethan Och Glenn Samala (SparkFun Electronics) Jana Marie Hemsing Jason Prince (Umorpha Systems) James “Laen” Neal (OSH Park) Jason Huggins (Tapster Robotics) Jason Kridner Jeff Sheldon Jeffrey Yoo Warren Jilles Groenendijk Joe McManus Joe Steinmeyer Joel Murphy (Pulse Sensor) Joseph Fitzpatrick Joshua Lifton (Crowd Supply) Katherine Scott Harris Kenny (Intro) Hernan Monserrat Hilary Mason Matthew Howlett Matthias Tarasiewicz (RIAT Institute) Michael Ossmann (Great Scott Gadgets) Michael Shiloh Michael Weinberg Mike Fikes (Vouch) Nadya Peek Nathan Seidle (SparkFun Electronics) Neil Hendin (Google ChromeOS HW Group) Patrice Nadeau Paul Clark Piers Hawksley Pranav Ananthan Preston Raab Rhys Doud Roland Wilhelm, Purdue University Ron Evans (The Hybrid Group) Shah Selbe Shawn Hymel (Hello Blink Show) Srinivas Chandupatla (BITS Pilani) Tangus Koech (Vice Chairman, IEEE) Tao Wang (CEO – Chengyi Semiconductors) Vijay Pradeep Wendy Seltzer
Business Endorsements
Chengyi Semiconductors Great Scott Gadgets Hidden Door Markforged Inc. Tengda Electronics Texas Instruments

[KE5FX]

Not that I know, but how many really successful software or hardware projects are there that aren't fully open? I'd expect the answer to be none.

Well, there's at least one, because Teensy is indisputably commercially successful.

What a bizarre rant.  Of course it's valuable to release a product that's open to inspection and modification, while reserving some proprietary parts (that are largely irrelevant at the user level) to stave off cut-rate Asian clones.

[Andy Chee]

Not that I know, but how many really successful software or hardware projects are there that aren't fully open? I'd expect the answer to be none.

By what metric are you measuring success?

Also, when I think of "open source hardware", I think of the adjective form, not the proper noun form that specifically refers to any official organisational bureaucracy, structure, or body.

[EEVblog]

Much as I would love to make everything 100% open source,

Why make any of it open source if you aren't, or feel you cannot, make it 100% open? With software if there was a closed binary blob that had to be linked into the final executable it would really make the rest unpalatable. Making a commercial product partially closed seems rather pointless if others cannot reproduce it and take it in other directions. Commercial or open seem kind of mutually exclusive.

Did you watch my video?
Just the act of releasing say schematics for a product can be hugely valuable for repair or modification.
You know, the whole Right To Repair thing.

Not that I know, but how many really successful software or hardware projects are there that aren't fully open? I'd expect the answer to be none.

Any successful product that has a schematic available for starters, consumer, commercial, or hobby.
The Teensy being discussed of course is very popular, if it wasn't popular, no one would care.