Author Topic: FTDIgate 2.0?  (Read 381064 times)

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Offline madires

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #625 on: February 08, 2016, 03:02:00 pm »
It's funny how much the Yay FTDI side keeps getting back on "counterfeiters are bad" every few comments, as if that addresses the other side's points at all...

It's not funny, it's what they are paid for. Keep trolling with the same lame arguments while ignoring valid points of others until any critic gives up out of frustration. Actually we could do the same and increase FTDI's PR costs  >:D

For example, I can't remember that any of the Yays agreed to the suggestion that the FTDI's driver simply could stop working without any modification (USB ID, data sent) when it detects a non genuine FTDI chip. That would be a perfectly legal way, but not good enough for the Yays. Of course not, since they have to defend FTDI's illegal (in several countries) bricking and modifying data. And by doing so, they make it worse for FTDI. Anyone following this topic can easily see what's happening. It's always the same story. A company does something bad, a shit storm starts, company hires social media experts for damage control, forums are trolled until nobody says anything bad anymore about the company. Thank you very much bad company! We can play this until the cows come home  :popcorn:
 

Offline C

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #626 on: February 08, 2016, 11:18:21 pm »

Karel
You sure like to pick what you want to read and ignore the rest.

1. Nice old serial printer with end user using a USB to serial adapter.

2. Nice old serial printer with MFR selling a USB to serial adapter with printer.

3. Nice old serial printer with MFR using a USB to serial adapter cable inside printer.

4. Nice old serial printer with MFR using a USB to serial chip on PC board in printer.

All valid ways before using a USB controller and giving the end user something better that uses USB.

The costs of FTDI bad acts is costing everyone time and money that get hit with FTDI's actions.

FTDI's Bad acts.
1. Changing the windows driver to detect or try to detect non FTDI's chips.
2. FTDI driver changing settings on a device.
3. FTDI's current "NON GENUINE DEVICE FOUND!"

These acts have cost end users time and money.
The acts have cost MFR's that are not a member of the USB-IF time and money.
How much has it cost the counterfeiters?

Think about #1, may not take much time to do but when you add up the numbers the cost in time lost world wide is huge. This is a cost to everyone using this driver. 

The final blow is that one test of a device identified  by FTDI's driver is better then FTDI at meeting FTDI's data specifications. This proves it's not a clone, but a better part using same USB packets.

"No FTDI parts used!" is now an important statement to see where their parts could be used.

I have no FTDI parts, I will not knowingly buy something that has FTDI parts.
I see MFR's that continue to use FTDI parts as now supporting FTDI's bad acts.

 

Offline Muxr

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #627 on: February 09, 2016, 12:55:34 am »
AdaFruit did an interview with the CEO of FTDI, it's interesting to hear from him directly:

https://blog.adafruit.com/2016/02/08/exclusive-interview-with-fred-dart-ceo-of-ftdi-ftdichip-ftdi-adafruit/

Quote
Exclusive interview with Fred Dart – CEO of FTDI @FTDIChip #FTDI @adafruit



Hey folks, we sent some questions over to Fred Dart the CEO of FTDI (website, twitter, personal twitter)… Here they are!

What is the history of FTDI? You’re the founder and CEO for 25 years, that is impressive! It would be interesting to go into some details around how FTDI started, what your motivation was for starting it, how it grew and what kind of challenges you had to overcome over its ~25 year history, etc.
Before FTDI, I ran a one-man consultancy designing PC motherboards and peripherals mainly for companies in Asia. Early designs were based on programmable logic ( PALS ) and discrete TTL, but then the focus changed to integrating much of this logic into “chipsets” which mopped up all the logic into a few ASIC devices. So, I took my existing skills and learned how to design in silicon as opposed to discrete logic. After designing a few chips for others, I decided to design and sell own branded chips and so FTDI was born.
In the early ( pre-USB ) days we designed and sold 286/386/486 PC chipsets but we were reliant on a customer base of just 2 or 3 customers including IBM at one point. This was very hard business for a small relatively unknown company of 5 people based in Scotland. When USB came along, I realised there would be a sea change in the peripheral market so I decided to move out of PC chipsets and into USB peripheral interface chips. After a false start ( USB keyboard, mice and joysticks ), we found our niche in designing legacy USB converter chips, like the USB UART bridge chips we are famous for today.

Our main challenge in the early days was lack of funding and consequentially lack of manpower resource which often resulted in time-to-market delays. The other challenge was building up a brand name as few people had heard about FTDI at that time. We were entirely self-funded and still are to this day.. It took 10 years before we finally achieved “critical mass” where we could afford to properly grow the company.

?Can you describe the product lines at FTDI and goals for the company. What would you say your mission and cause is?
We are best known for our USB interface bridge solutions such as the popular FT232R USB-UART chips + drivers. These allow an engineer to interface technologies such as USB to a UART interface without having to understand the underlying technology, USB in this case and develop and support drivers for various platforms. This methodology works well – for instance a product developed 15 years ago using our FT232B chips can run on Windows 10 as can our more modern family – same drivers. More recently we’ve been looking at innovative TFT display interfacing with our EVE object orientated ( FT8xx ) family and are moving into mass production with our brand new FT9xx 32-bit MCU family which is capable of interfacing many different technologies together.

Our common mission in all these I would say is “Bridging Technologies” aimed at providing quality solutions for engineers (and Makers) to help bring their product development to market faster and with less ongoing technical support required.

How many people do you have? How many locations, how many products sold, etc?
Currently, we employ around 130 folks worldwide in R&D, technical support, sales, purchasing, logistics, finance and admin roles. We have 5 offices worldwide in Glasgow UK, Portland US, Taipei Taiwan, Shanghai China and Singapore. Singapore is not listed on our website as it’s an R&D centre only. We sell tens of millions of chips annually, mainly USB bridge products, though we hope to grow other areas as well.

To jump right to what everyone wants to know, what happened before and currently with the FTDI drivers from Windows update regarding counterfeit chips?
The problem first appeared some time back when we were sent some samples of a Chinese made “FTDI” USB-RS232 cable that seemed to be behaving in a way we couldn’t reproduce in our lab. On testing these cables, they seemed to work and install with our drivers, however the throughput was well below what we expected and usage was not very stable. We were puzzled at first, then suspicious. The markings on the”FT232RL” chip looked correct **but** on close scrutiny not exactly so and the date code did not match our records. Desoldering the chip and looking at the markings on the bottom of the chip confirmed our suspicions –it was marked as been Made In China! Contrary to rumours I’ve seen on the internet, FTDI neither fabricate nor assemble ANY of our chips in China. We had the chips de-capped and photographed and the die inside was totally different – seemed like a MCU programmed to emulate an FT232R, whilst the real device uses interlocked state machines – hard to design but gives superior real-time performance.

We seem to have caught it early, before it spread like a cancer so, an action plan was needed starting with containment and information gathering. The counterfeit chip was totally different design to the real FT232R and basically an imperfect copy, therefore it can be caught by our drivers in several ways which you’ll understand me keeping to myself. So, action number one was to detect counterfeit chips and stop them illegally using our drivers ( they steal our USB VID and PID in order to masquerade as an FTDI chip). This in no way affects the millions of genuine FTDI users and allowed us to analyse the situation a lot better.

Why do this instead of a notice on the web page or driver?
?Genuine customers are not affected so it doesn’t help by causing a panic. We needed to analyse the situation and decide on a plan of action. Basically, what we discovered was that 90% of the problem were Arduino “bargain” copy/clone related, mainly sold on EBay, Alibaba, Amazon Marketplace by anonymous sellers. The rest was cheap “FTDI” USB RS232 cables sold likewise. I’m sure it occurs to most reasonable folks that a bargain bought in the internet version of a flea market may be cheap for a reason.

Do you see a lot of counterfeiting of your products?
Not really – it’s largely restricted to the FT232RL ( SSOP only ) and occasionally the older FT232BL.

Do you have an estimate of how many companies are using the FTDI trademark for counterfeits?

Just one or two only.

Do you have an estimate of how much business you’ve lost due to counterfeiting?

It’s really hard to put an estimate on this – I’d guess in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Is FTDI feeling more business/financial pressure due to counterfeiters or from competing companies?
We are ALWAYS under pressure from competitors who would love to “eat our breakfast” and we realise this. However, our reputation for providing robust USB bridge solutions help us maintain market share amongst genuine customers even though some of our competitors are large corporations. Financially, we are independent and debt-free, so we don’t worry too much on that front. Our main concern with counterfeit parts which are passed off as genuine FTDI chips is that their substandard performance and total disregard to quality will damage our hard-won reputation as people mistake these fakes for the genuine article. It’s our duty to protect ourselves and our much valued customers.

Do counterfeit chips ever make it into the ‘big disti’ network, e.g. arrow, digikey, mouser, element 14, RS etc. or is it purely gray market?
I can only speak for FTDI but in our case, the answer is definitely not. We’ve not had one single instance of a fake chip being sold by our listed sales distributor chains, most of whom we supply directly to avoid supply chain corruption. We don’t approve of the gray market as they sell fakes and real chips indiscriminately. A lot of these fakes are supplied through the infamous Shenzhen component market to the local Chinese manufacturers. Some are resold by anonymous sellers though EBay, Alibaba, BangGood etc. in small lots usually though China Post. You complain, send them cease to desist letters , but they disappear and re-appear shortly afterwards with a new identity.

How much support do you have to do for counterfeit products, do companies and customers call you with support problems due to counterfeits?
Yes, it causes a big headache for our support department – not from genuine FTDI customers of course. We’ve now made it easy to spot this by getting our latest drivers to flag any counterfeits by issuing a “Non Genuine Device” string which makes the issue obvious and saves time all round. The counterfeit device does not get harmed or re-programmed in any way – the drivers simply refuse to work with recognised counterfeit chips. Following our previous driver release, I’ve had many helpful suggestions on how the driver should respond when it finds a counterfeit chip. We can’t please everyone but the vast majority voted for this approach and that’s what we did.

What can chip companies do to stop counterfeiting? What are the issues with that?
Firstly, trademark your logo – not just the fancy one you put on your web site **but** the one you use on your chips too. We’ve worked very closely with the US customs teaching them how to identify counterfeit FTDI components and this has resulted in several shipments of fake ships to gray market re-sellers in the US being impounded and destroyed. ?Secondly, keep a tight control of your distribution chain and discourage them from supplying to gray market re-sellers.
Thirdly, should it happen, take action as soon as possible. Doing nothing makes the problem worse and harder to control.

Have you considered legal action against the counterfeiters?
?Yes, we’ve appointed a legal firm in China to represent us there and we do our best. However, you should realise that we are dealing with a professional criminal gang here who counterfeit a lot more than just one or two chips. I’m pretty sure it’s the same gang that flooded the market with fake Prolific PL2303 chips a few years ago. They are very good at covering their tracks – in order to bring them to justice you would need an inside informer or an FBI style sting operation. Chinese law leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to counterfeiting.

The new FT231 series has the same essential functionality as the FT232, but is nearly half the cost – (the older chips costs more, how does that work?).
When you have a success like the venerable FT232R, don’t sit on your laurels and let your competiton eat away at your market share. Be your own competition! The FT232R uses a older large geometry 5V process – but the great thing is, it can drive out at full 5V levels. Our X series family of which the FT231X is just one, uses a much smaller geometry process, which combined with smaller packages reduces the cost of the X series substantially. The downside – it can only drive out at 3.3V max though it has 5V tolerant inputs. We recommend the X series for new designs, but despite this, many folks prefer to stick with the tried and trusted R series. Either way, I don’t mind – it’s good to offer customers the choice. ?

Anything you’d like to tell the maker community out there?
I started off as an electronic hobbyist, what you would term a maker today, as a teenager in the early 1970’s and it’s great to see this tradition revived by the Maker community today.
The best form of education is self-education where you lean by wanting to learn as opposed to being force-fed boring facts in a classroom. I would credit Arduino in particular as instrumental in reviving the interest in DIY electronics. They generously allows derivatives of the platform to be produced under an open-source hardware licence, though sadly a few rotten apples do not keep to the spirit of the agreement. When looking for a supplier, choose one that contributes to the community in the form of extensive tutorials, drivers and examples. Our good friends at Adafruit ( and Sparkfun too ) especially come to mind – buying from them helps reward their time and effort spent to improve our education. Lastly, if you’re tempted by an internet bargain from an anonymous supplier, well ok, but don’t be disappointed if it’s not what it seems.

 

Offline nctnico

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #628 on: February 09, 2016, 01:14:00 am »
He basically admits FTDI can't keep the lid on the fakes and they will continue to tune their driver to detect fakes even if they get better. All in all there is no guarantee false positives will be avoided or that a fake chip can end up in the supply line (judging from batches being imported into the US this is a real threat). Still reason enough to avoid USB-UART bridges from FTDI to be absolutely sure you won't get burned.

Oh, and Fred is playing the underdog card nicely even though FTDI is a multi-million dollar company!
There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.
 

Online amyk

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #629 on: February 09, 2016, 01:18:32 am »

:o Are you sure you didn't get the two mixed up? Or perhaps they're both actually clones, but one passes the test enough to identify as genuine?

AFAIK the clones use a microcontroller whereas the genuine ones are a full ASIC. If true, funny to see the former beating the latter in timing stability... it's usually the other way around.
Totally sure. It's a documented errata of the FT232R that was never fixed as far as I can tell, and there is no usable workaround (the workaround in that PDF is total bullshit, because you can't actually feed it data fast enough through USB to keep up with the max bitbang clockrate). The clone chip got it right. The errata PDF actually goes out of its way to be misleading and imply that the bug is fixed in Rev B, while it isn't - of the 3 issues documented, two say "fixed in rev B", but not the timing issue, and the Revision B section says "There are no known new functional issues specific to revision B.". I can confirm that genuine revision C chips are still bugged in bitbang mode. So, two silicon revisions later FTDI still hasn't fixed their broken bitbang mode, while the cloners got it right on the first try (as far as I can tell).

Quote from: Fred Dart - CEO of FTDI
We had the chips de-capped and photographed and the die inside was totally different – seemed like a MCU programmed to emulate an FT232R, whilst the real device uses interlocked state machines – hard to design but gives superior real-time performance.
:-DD :-DD :-DD :-DD
 

Offline miguelvp

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #630 on: February 09, 2016, 01:22:46 am »
He basically admits FTDI can't keep the lid on the fakes and they will continue to tune their driver to detect fakes even if they get better. All in all there is no guarantee false positives will be avoided or that a fake chip can end up in the supply line (judging from batches being imported into the US this is a real threat). Still reason enough to avoid USB-UART bridges from FTDI to be absolutely sure you won't get burned.

Oh, and Fred is playing the underdog card nicely even though FTDI is a multi-million dollar company!

I guess 10 million dollars is multi-million by definition, Fake clones cost of hundreds of thousands is just around 1% + not sure what his problem is.

Not a single fake chip on your standard distribution chains is a good thing and that does bring customer confidence.

And as for underdog, well, they are the underdog on that business.
 

Offline mtdoc

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #631 on: February 09, 2016, 01:24:38 am »
Too bad Adafruit didn't ask him about the impact of their actions on end users and companies using Chinese contract manufacturers or about their actions on twitter...

Also he references Arduino clones being the main problem.  I didn't think any Arduino clones are using "FTDI" chips - are they?
« Last Edit: February 09, 2016, 01:27:05 am by mtdoc »
 

Offline Muxr

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #632 on: February 09, 2016, 01:34:09 am »
Also he references Arduino clones being the main problem.  I didn't think any Arduino clones are using "FTDI" chips - are they?
Pretty sure most of the Arduino UNO clones use FTDI clones.
 

Offline mtdoc

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #633 on: February 09, 2016, 01:43:52 am »
Also he references Arduino clones being the main problem.  I didn't think any Arduino clones are using "FTDI" chips - are they?
Pretty sure most of the Arduino UNO clones use FTDI clones.

None of the ones I use have FTDI or clones. A quick search of eBay shows that they all seem to be using the CH340 chip.

Also - the "genuine" Unos do not use an FTDI chip either. Me thinks this guy is a bit out of touch with that market...
« Last Edit: February 09, 2016, 01:51:15 am by mtdoc »
 

Offline c4757p

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #634 on: February 09, 2016, 01:47:39 am »
Quote
Do you see a lot of counterfeiting of your products?
Not really – it’s largely restricted to the FT232RL ( SSOP only ) and occasionally the older FT232BL.

Do you have an estimate of how much business you’ve lost due to counterfeiting?

It’s really hard to put an estimate on this – I’d guess in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Huh. Only hundreds of thousands? Their business is waaaay bigger than that. Seems they're taking an awful lot of risk for rather low gain.

Quote

Do you have an estimate of how many companies are using the FTDI trademark for counterfeits?

Just one or two only.

Mr. Dart lives in an alternate reality if he thinks compatibles not using the FTDI name are counterfeits rather than just, well, compatibles... Hint, he probably typed this on a descendant of an "IBM PC compatible" |O
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Offline Muxr

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #635 on: February 09, 2016, 01:50:36 am »
Also he references Arduino clones being the main problem.  I didn't think any Arduino clones are using "FTDI" chips - are they?
Pretty sure most of the Arduino UNO clones use FTDI clones.

None of the ones I use have FTDI or clones. A quick search of eBay shows that they all seem to be using the CH340 chip
Hmm I checked one of mine and you're right it is a CH chip. I was just going by the first FTDI Clone Gate where it seemed the complaints mostly came from the Arduino users. I don't use Windows so I thought I wasn't impacted because of that.
 

Offline c4757p

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #636 on: February 09, 2016, 01:50:55 am »

:o Are you sure you didn't get the two mixed up? Or perhaps they're both actually clones, but one passes the test enough to identify as genuine?

AFAIK the clones use a microcontroller whereas the genuine ones are a full ASIC. If true, funny to see the former beating the latter in timing stability... it's usually the other way around.
Totally sure. It's a documented errata of the FT232R that was never fixed as far as I can tell, and there is no usable workaround (the workaround in that PDF is total bullshit, because you can't actually feed it data fast enough through USB to keep up with the max bitbang clockrate). The clone chip got it right. The errata PDF actually goes out of its way to be misleading and imply that the bug is fixed in Rev B, while it isn't - of the 3 issues documented, two say "fixed in rev B", but not the timing issue, and the Revision B section says "There are no known new functional issues specific to revision B.". I can confirm that genuine revision C chips are still bugged in bitbang mode. So, two silicon revisions later FTDI still hasn't fixed their broken bitbang mode, while the cloners got it right on the first try (as far as I can tell).

Quote from: Fred Dart - CEO of FTDI
We had the chips de-capped and photographed and the die inside was totally different – seemed like a MCU programmed to emulate an FT232R, whilst the real device uses interlocked state machines – hard to design but gives superior real-time performance.
:-DD :-DD :-DD :-DD

Yeah, that's an amusing one. Looks like the clones are not only better, but more intelligently designed (seriously? interlocking state machines?)! I'd take a clone any day if not for the malicious drivers...
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Offline Muxr

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #637 on: February 09, 2016, 01:53:03 am »

:o Are you sure you didn't get the two mixed up? Or perhaps they're both actually clones, but one passes the test enough to identify as genuine?

AFAIK the clones use a microcontroller whereas the genuine ones are a full ASIC. If true, funny to see the former beating the latter in timing stability... it's usually the other way around.
Totally sure. It's a documented errata of the FT232R that was never fixed as far as I can tell, and there is no usable workaround (the workaround in that PDF is total bullshit, because you can't actually feed it data fast enough through USB to keep up with the max bitbang clockrate). The clone chip got it right. The errata PDF actually goes out of its way to be misleading and imply that the bug is fixed in Rev B, while it isn't - of the 3 issues documented, two say "fixed in rev B", but not the timing issue, and the Revision B section says "There are no known new functional issues specific to revision B.". I can confirm that genuine revision C chips are still bugged in bitbang mode. So, two silicon revisions later FTDI still hasn't fixed their broken bitbang mode, while the cloners got it right on the first try (as far as I can tell).

Quote from: Fred Dart - CEO of FTDI
We had the chips de-capped and photographed and the die inside was totally different – seemed like a MCU programmed to emulate an FT232R, whilst the real device uses interlocked state machines – hard to design but gives superior real-time performance.
:-DD :-DD :-DD :-DD

Yeah, that's an amusing one. Looks like the clones are not only better, but more intelligently designed (seriously? interlocking state machines?)! I'd take a clone any day if not for the malicious drivers...
Of course this also means that they might have a different set of bugs, plus, I would like to see the side by side performance and power usage measurements.

edit: also they can't be that clever if they can be perma bricked
« Last Edit: February 09, 2016, 01:55:14 am by Muxr »
 

Offline retrolefty

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #638 on: February 09, 2016, 01:58:57 am »
I think Fred made his case pretty well.  :-+

 For FTDI I think the whole thing will work out in time. I've tracked Asian Arduino clones for some years now and the solution for the Asians seem to be a CH340 chip which must be very cheap as modules like the cloned arduino nano have never been cheaper:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Nano-V3-0-ATmega328-CH340G-5V-16M-Micro-controller-board-For-Arduino-/391380712780?hash=item5b201bbd4c:g:5pwAAOSwy4hUTv2u

 My question is, is the AVR 328P a non-fake? How cheap can they buy real 328P chips and a CH340 USB serial convertor and still be able to sell the module for $2.20 with free shipment. Amazing.
 

Offline c4757p

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #639 on: February 09, 2016, 02:00:15 am »
Of course, any new implementation has its own bugs, I was being mostly facetious. As for bricking, wasn't "FTDIgate 1.0" exploiting a feature of all FT232 chips (customizable VID/PID) to "brick" them?
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Offline c4757p

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #640 on: February 09, 2016, 02:01:35 am »
Fake AVRs is an interesting question. Chips like FT232 are usually faked by programming a microcontroller to emulate them, as seen here, but that's not exactly going to work for an AVR, is it? I wonder how they manage to efficiently counterfeit actual microcontrollers (and really, in what sort of volume that goes on...)
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Offline Muxr

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #641 on: February 09, 2016, 02:05:38 am »
I think Fred made his case pretty well.  :-+

 For FTDI I think the whole thing will work out in time. I've tracked Asian Arduino clones for some years now and the solution for the Asians seem to be a CH340 chip which must be very cheap as modules like the cloned arduino nano have never been cheaper:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Nano-V3-0-ATmega328-CH340G-5V-16M-Micro-controller-board-For-Arduino-/391380712780?hash=item5b201bbd4c:g:5pwAAOSwy4hUTv2u

 My question is, is the AVR 328P a non-fake? How cheap can they buy real 328P chips and a CH340 USB serial convertor and still be able to sell the module for $2.20 with free shipment. Amazing.
Yeah that price is unbelievable. I always wonder about that. I think recently though I found out that the shipping is subsidized by the Chinese government. Which explains the shipping part, but the chip must be fake, although in 2500 quantity on Mouser it's only $1.60. So it is possible that they are getting them for half that on the secondary market.

edit: wait that's an auction though, the going price on Ebay is more like $7.25, so quite plausible: http://www.ebay.com/itm/MINI-USB-Nano-V3-0-ATmega328P-CH340G-5V-16M-Micro-controller-board-Arduino-/191759577435?hash=item2ca5c2f15b:g:Be4AAOSwp5JWbiLn
« Last Edit: February 09, 2016, 02:09:06 am by Muxr »
 

Offline mtdoc

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #642 on: February 09, 2016, 02:08:18 am »
I think Fred made his case pretty well.  :-+

He made the case for why counterfeit chips are bad - which I don't think anyone here disputes. Unfortunately he didn't address any of the issues and criticisms that their method of combating clones has raised.


Quote
I've tracked Asian Arduino clones for some years now and the solution for the Asians seem to be a CH340 chip which must be very cheap as modules like the cloned arduino nano have never been cheaper:

Were Arduino clones using "FTDI" chips in the past?  The oldest ones I have are 3-4 years old and they don't.


Quote
My question is, is the AVR 328P a non-fake? How cheap can they buy real 328P chips and a CH340 USB serial convertor and still be able to sell the module for $2.20 with free shipment. Amazing.

Yeah, I agree - it's truly amazing.
 

Offline nctnico

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #643 on: February 09, 2016, 02:10:31 am »
Mr. Dart lives in an alternate reality if he thinks compatibles not using the FTDI name are counterfeits rather than just, well, compatibles... Hint, he probably typed this on a descendant of an "IBM PC compatible" |O
Actually he started his business by making chips for IBM clones. Oh the irony!
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Offline c4757p

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #644 on: February 09, 2016, 02:17:52 am »
Oh that's hilarious.
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Offline Muxr

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #645 on: February 09, 2016, 02:17:57 am »
When people say Arduino they usually mean Arduino One R3. While this one doesn't actually use the AtMega328PU DIP part the original uses, it is certainly the most popular:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-UNO-R3-ATmega328P-CH340-Mini-USB-Board-for-Compatible-Arduino-/311155383820?hash=item48724e5e0c:g:QKMAAOSwdpxUU0UP

16,566 sold holy cow, and it uses the CH340 chip. Still though at $3.50 it is still amazing. The $2.80 shipping fee doesn't get charged multiple times if you order multiple.
« Last Edit: February 09, 2016, 02:20:25 am by Muxr »
 

Offline station240

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #646 on: February 09, 2016, 08:19:29 am »
AdaFruit did an interview with the CEO of FTDI, it's interesting to hear from him directly:

https://blog.adafruit.com/2016/02/08/exclusive-interview-with-fred-dart-ceo-of-ftdi-ftdichip-ftdi-adafruit/

Quote
Exclusive interview with Fred Dart – CEO of FTDI @FTDIChip #FTDI @adafruit


Do you have an estimate of how much business you’ve lost due to counterfeiting?

It’s really hard to put an estimate on this – I’d guess in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Hahaha, he screwed his company's repulation over hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Most companies wouldn't go to this much trouble for sums less than a million.

Anyone want to do an educated guess to work out how many chips that could be ?
 

Offline miguelvp

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #647 on: February 09, 2016, 08:56:53 am »
Hahaha, he screwed his company's repulation over hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Most companies wouldn't go to this much trouble for sums less than a million.

Anyone want to do an educated guess to work out how many chips that could be ?

They sell tens of millions and have a profit of 10 million or so. So about 100 thousand fake chips plus support costs.

Or 1% which I was joking on being small, because it's pretty big.
 

Offline westfw

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #648 on: February 09, 2016, 09:11:33 am »
Quote
I didn't think any Arduino clones are using "FTDI" chips - are they?
For quite a while Arduino Nano clones used FTDI (or counterfeit FTDI) chips.   The official Nanos were rather overpriced (IMO), so the clones were very popular. It's even possible that some of the "genuine" Nanos had fake FTDIs; during FTDUGate1, most of the complaints I heard were from people with Nanos, and some of them had purchased their boards through reputable distributors.  (Note that the Nano was originally manufactured by a separate company: Gravitech.)   Nowadays, Genuine Nano's are apparently being made by Arduino SRL, and most of the clones have move to CH340g chips (incidentally making them derivatives rather than clones.)
 

Offline AlxDroidDev

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Re: FTDIgate 2.0?
« Reply #649 on: February 09, 2016, 03:38:55 pm »
Also he references Arduino clones being the main problem.  I didn't think any Arduino clones are using "FTDI" chips - are they?
Pretty sure most of the Arduino UNO clones use FTDI clones.

Wrong. Not a single one. The clones use either an  Atmel 16U2 or the CH340G. I have NEVER seen an UNO using a  FTDI, real or fake.

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