You said it yourself.Sure you'd be better off not trying to trigger a problem
As I wrote before: I have come across firmware doing safety critical tasks and it got upset from receiving data it didn't expect. There is nothing hypothetical about that! Also the assumption FTDI present and future detection algorithms will never be wrong is a false one. So even with a real chip there is a probability things can go wrong (Murphy's law).
As I wrote before: I have come across firmware doing safety critical tasks and it got upset from receiving data it didn't expect. There is nothing hypothetical about that! Also the assumption FTDI present and future detection algorithms will never be wrong is a false one. So even with a real chip there is a probability things can go wrong (Murphy's law).This thread is getting absurd in the claims some people are making regarding safety critical products. Any competent designer of a product with a critical safety factor involved is going to take special care that the device cannot malfunction if it gets bad data from an FTDI chip or any other source. He will use error detecting algorithms to insure the integrity
You are being super naive here!!! You really don't want to know the shitty firmware I have come across and which still can pass safety regulation tests without problems.
On a side note, some PL-2303HX drivers will simply not work with fake PL2303 chips, but it won't even touch the chip in any way. Prolific even has a utility to detect fake chips.
You are being super naive here!!! You really don't want to know the shitty firmware I have come across and which still can pass safety regulation tests without problems.Perhaps we live in different worlds then. In the world I live in engineers take pride in their work and engineer it properly. If there are any safety aspects to a design, they take care that even uncommon failure modes are taken into account and handled properly in a combination of hardware and firmware interlocks.
Just because some people and companies create shitty, dangerous products doesn't mean that everyone does. Tell me--before all this FTDI stuff started, did engineers designing safety critical products that relied on a serial data stream in a safety critical part of the product assume that this data stream was 100% reliable 100% of the time?
Again: I have seen released-for-production safety critical firmware do weird stuff when/after receiving unexpected data. And I've seen much worse than that as well. So yes, competent engineers are very rare. Even with safety interlocks and so on poorly designed firmware can still cause lots of trouble.
If you search for 'woman falls in elevator shaft' you'll notice it -shockingly- happens very often! The case I was referring to happened in Germany.
My favorite part is where you admit you're wrong and still keep going
Any competent designer of a product with a critical safety factor involved is going to take special care that the device cannot malfunction if it gets bad data from an FTDI chip or any other source.
Also the assumption FTDI present and future detection algorithms will never be wrong is a false one.
These companies should be run out of business. I'm not a big fan of government regulation, but this is a case where it's needed. Poor engineering of products with safety critical aspects should not be tolerated.
Also the assumption FTDI present and future detection algorithms will never be wrong is a false one.Can you provide a link to a documented event that shows that FDTI wrongly detected a non-genuine chip
while in reality it was genuine?
It's interesting to see how some people are clutching at straws and use all kinds of hypothetical cases to justify
their angriness against FTDI instead of pointing to the real culprits (the cloners)...
QuoteAny competent designer of a product with a critical safety factor involved is going to take special care that the device cannot malfunction if it gets bad data from an FTDI chip or any other source.
Wrong.
Any competent designer of a product with a critical safety factor involved is going to take special care to reduce the likelihood of device malfunction down to an acceptable level.
There is no zero risk.
Extending this to the realm of this forum, it's why many people here are so eager to buy cheap Arduino and Segger J-Link clones from China -- they don't care about quality or the fact that these products rip off the original designer of these items.
They're the same people who'd buy counterfeit Rolex watches or Prada shoes.
I have a car analogy:
Let's say the rubber diaphragm in the carburetor of my car failed, so I went and bought a new one, replaced the failed one and my car works again. Unknown to me, the new diaphragm is a counterfeit, made from cheaper materials and won't last as long, but should still last a while. However, while I was at a gas station one day, a man came by, opened he hood of my car, found out that the diaphragm is not genuine and cut it up making my car inoperable (FTDIgate 1) or fixed the throttle valve to full open (FTDIgate 2). I do not think I would be OK with that and my anger would be with the man who disabled my car. If and when the fake part failed prematurely by itself, only then my anger would be with the counterfeiter.
But then again, I can buy car parts made by whoever wants to, as long as they fit and work OK...
But then again, I can buy car parts made by whoever wants to, as long as they fit and work OK...
You can't win with these trolls.
The dangerous part is all speculation.Surprise that you said this. Of course, it is speculation when you have no real body count to prove . Once you have one, it becomes a crisis when something not suppose to happen happens, and people started to ask where are all the planning, thinking, and were the engineers sleeping?