BMP280 / BMP388

[artag]

There are huge numbers of breakout boards with a BMP280 pressure sensor available from asian sources, but Bosch made it obsolete in 2018. Mouser show it as not availble to order and offers BMP384, 390 and 581. LCSC have a few thousand 280 and a few hundred 388.

The recommended replacement seems to be the BMP388 at a much higher price on a board and about twice the price as a bare device.

Is the BMP280 widely cloned or are there just lots in the channel  ? I've been using it for some time and must surely have encountered clones by now but haven't noticed any particular problems. Perhaps I just need to test them more thoroughly.

[thm_w]

LCSC has 10,000 of the BMP280's in stock. Winsource claims to have 500,000.
This Sencoch looks similar, although the can cutout is in a different spot: https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Pressure-Sensors_Sencoch-Semiconductor-GZP6816D_C3038127.html
There are the odd Aliexpress review saying they got bad readings, but, who knows if that was the fault of the user or the part..

Have you compared multiple units side by side to see if they read within a reasonable range? Or do you have a reference device to measure temp/humidity accurately.

[artag]

I haven't done any thorough testing. I think I may have seen some that are less sensitive but am by no means sure of that.
I should do it (though I will probably use a newer device for production - the old stocks may suddenly disappear.

I was mostly just curious as to whether other people (who may be better informed than me about supply chain issues) were aware of fakes.

[floobydust]

I have not seen any fakes, there might be some with no calibration though as a wild guess how to make them on the cheap.

The part is light sensitive, as well as wash/flux chemical sensitive.
There was a (Bosch) firmware bug where the EEPROM calibration constants would not get loaded properly unless you gave a power up delay I think 10 usec. Check your library code. I never found the Adafruit library to work, the accuracy was wrong as well and I changed to another and it worked fine.