FTDI driver kills fake FTDI FT232??

[zapta]

Is FTDI the only USB/Serial that has a driver in the default windows installation? 

If not, I don't see what advantage FTDI has these days considering the low cost of MCU/USB ICs.

[FPGAcrazy]

Is FTDI the only USB/Serial that has a driver in the default windows installation? 

If not, I don't see what advantage FTDI has these days considering the low cost of MCU/USB ICs.

I don't know if it is the only one.
But it is probabely one of the few that is signed.

Most MCUs often offer a USB interface, but all the firmware you still need to write. Also you have to write a driver for such a device. You need to get the necessary IDs and once you have written the driver you need to get it signed. Complicated stuff.
The FTDI is a simple device with little logic needed and RS232 out. So you can hook it up to your device very easily.

[hobbes]

The chips are sold as counterfeits and therefor they should not be used. This is very simple and is valid in the whole of europe.  A fake Rolex will also be destroyed and the buyer is responsible for this. Actually buying counterfeit products is a crime.

Agreed. Although, a device showing the FTDI logo is a counterfeit product. A device that contains none of their IP and only behaves like their own, using the original USB ID and all, is technically not.

[nsayer]

By the way, I don't think anyone has brought this up yet.

How do we know that in the future this, or similar actions taken in FTDI's driver won't accidentally brick legitimate FTDI devices? I can easily envision a particular - maybe old - hardware version of one of their devices being left out of a test matrix and then suddenly FTDI (and their customers and customers' customers) are hoist by their own petard.

No, the risk is too great now to use FTDI chips - legitimate or otherwise - anymore.

[chicken]

The apportion of blame between FTDI & Microsoft may also be tricky to determine. 
I would _really_ like to know if MS knew about it though.

I'm pretty sure FTDI had to sign legal agreements that put any responsibility onto themselves.

From "Windows Certification Program Hardware Certification Policies and Processes"
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34791

Windows Certification Program Testing Agreement. This agreement includes language that is related to testing procedures, testing policies, intellectual property rights, support requirements, audit policies, payment policies, indemnification, warranty, liabilities, confidentiality, term and termination, metadata, and digital rights management (DRM) clauses. Signing this agreement is required for participation in the program.

[_Sin]

By the way, I don't think anyone has brought this up yet.

How do we know that in the future this, or similar actions taken in FTDI's driver won't accidentally brick legitimate FTDI devices? I can easily envision a particular - maybe old - hardware version of one of their devices being left out of a test matrix and then suddenly FTDI (and their customers and customers' customers) are hoist by their own petard.

No, the risk is too great now to use FTDI chips - legitimate or otherwise - anymore.

The way the bricking works, that seems unlikely - there's no per-device detection, it's already 'trying' to brick all devices and authentic ones are just not vulnerable to the method used.

Mind you, this is a pretty gung-ho thing to do at all, so not inconceivable that they've overlooked an obscure variant, or in an escalating arms race do something riskier.

[hpux735]

Is FTDI the only USB/Serial that has a driver in the default windows installation? 

If not, I don't see what advantage FTDI has these days considering the low cost of MCU/USB ICs.

I don't know if it is the only one.
But it is probabely one of the few that is signed.

Most MCUs often offer a USB interface, but all the firmware you still need to write. Also you have to write a driver for such a device. You need to get the necessary IDs and once you have written the driver you need to get it signed. Complicated stuff.
The FTDI is a simple device with little logic needed and RS232 out. So you can hook it up to your device very easily.

That's not that complicated.  I'm sure Dean Camera would be happy to accept a license fee for his LUFA USB CDC firmware.  In fact, I suspect that the price delta between a hardware USB atmel and the FT232 is substantially more than a commercial LUFA license.  Why don't we just do the math???

ATXMEGA16A4U @ digikey = $1.74 @ 2k units
FT232RL @ digikey = $3.05 @ 2k units

That leaves $1.31 per device.  I'm assuming we're going to make 2k units.  The commercial license for LUFA is $1500.  That means that once we sell 1145 units we've broken even.  By the time we've sold all 2000 devices, we've saved $1120.  It gets more complicated when we want to have our own VID/PID.  Last I checked, getting your own VID costs $2000 from usb.org.  If you have more than one project subject to such analysis, you're going to come out ahead.  Another option is to request one from the vendor.  Atmel will allow you to use their VID/PID provided that you don't try to use it for USB compliance, among other things:

Customer may keep the Atmel Vendor Identifier (Atmel VID) and Product Identifier (PID) in their product that integrates an Atmel USB Flash Microcontroller (“Integrated Product”) from one Atmel original example subject to the following acknowledgments and/or conditions:

The point I'm getting at here is that FTDI's business is not sustainable even without this particular flap.  They have failed to truly innovate.  The've surely amortized the development and NREs from the FT232, and haven't adjusted the price down to reflect that.  It's economical to use a general-purpose micro controller to implement every feature of their product for less money.  What's the value proposition?  Their driver is included in windows?  Well, that's fantastic for them.  Mac and linux computers can use USB CDC devices without any driver at all.  For some idiotic reason, MS requires a INF for CDC devices.  Not only that, the FTDI driver available on the mac is a piece of shit.  If kernel panics my computer constantly.  I'm looking forward to a time where FTDI doesn't exist so everyone can move on to CDC.

[waldo]

There's certainly a big opportunity here for an fully open source USB-to-UART chip based on a microcontroller, especially now.  The embedded portion of such a project doesn't bother me nearly as much as the Windows driver.  USB device drivers routinely break about every other version of Windows and it is a significant burden to support the driver side of things.  This is one of the reasons I use FTDI and SiLabs chips - I let the chip vendor take care of the driver.  But if there was a critical mass of people wanting to design in such a device, this could happen as open source, even considering the costs associated with driver signing and USB vendor ID's.

[LabSpokane]

Most manufacturers don't pay book pricing on such ICs. FTDI has a sales force and they might offer better pricing if one has the volume and asks professionally.  The IC vendor will then issue you a letter allowing you to buy at the better price through distribution.

These negotiations happen all the time in the industry.

[hpux735]

Most manufacturers don't pay book pricing on such ICs. FTDI has a sales force and they might offer better pricing if one has the volume and asks professionally.  The IC vendor will then issue you a letter allowing you to buy at the better price through distribution.

These negotiations happen all the time in the industry.

Are you implying that Microchip and Atmel won't do the same thing?

[Simon]

Most manufacturers don't pay book pricing on such ICs. FTDI has a sales force and they might offer better pricing if one has the volume and asks professionally.  The IC vendor will then issue you a letter allowing you to buy at the better price through distribution.

These negotiations happen all the time in the industry.

any supplier will offer better prices on volume, even distributors will haggle if your spending thousands, even I've done deals with farnell for 1K

[uski]

The point I'm getting at here is that FTDI's business is not sustainable even without this particular flap.  They have failed to truly innovate.  The've surely amortized the development and NREs from the FT232, and haven't adjusted the price down to reflect that.  It's economical to use a general-purpose micro controller to implement every feature of their product for less money.  What's the value proposition?  Their driver is included in windows?  Well, that's fantastic for them.  Mac and linux computers can use USB CDC devices without any driver at all.  For some idiotic reason, MS requires a INF for CDC devices.  Not only that, the FTDI driver available on the mac is a piece of shit.  If kernel panics my computer constantly.  I'm looking forward to a time where FTDI doesn't exist so everyone can move on to CDC.

Absolutely true. FTDI does have some good chips but they will soon die if they don't innovate. What they did with their driver looks like a desperate act to try to keep their profit on their parts. Just like the music industry still expects to sell MP3 albums for $19.99 like they did in the past when they were selling CDs. They need to adapt - or they will die.

Most manufacturers don't pay book pricing on such ICs. FTDI has a sales force and they might offer better pricing if one has the volume and asks professionally.  The IC vendor will then issue you a letter allowing you to buy at the better price through distribution.

These negotiations happen all the time in the industry.

Are you implying that Microchip and Atmel won't do the same thing?

You'd be really, really surprised at how different the marketing policies are between manufacturers.
Some are willing to give you a good price upfront, some others require you to show a quotation from someone else before they align their prices, and some others are just too expensive no matter what you show them and loose the business.

[ThaHandy]

I just reinstalled windows 7 with FTDI driver not yet installed and still have some updates i need to install.
Anyone know which windows update is causing this?

Also I've ready by using FTDI/utilities/FT_PROG 2.8.2.0 u can change back the PID, but if it's a permanent solution, I can't tell.

[LabSpokane]

Most manufacturers don't pay book pricing on such ICs. FTDI has a sales force and they might offer better pricing if one has the volume and asks professionally.  The IC vendor will then issue you a letter allowing you to buy at the better price through distribution.

These negotiations happen all the time in the industry.

Are you implying that Microchip and Atmel won't do the same thing?

Not at all.

[M@rcel]

if you download the zipped non-latest driver from the ftdi website and unpack it somewhere on your pc, you can simply use "update driver" in device manager for a bricked device and point it to the .inf file of the downloaded driver. Do not let windows choose the correct driver, choose it yourself. Ignore the warnings windows issues and you're done. The device is now usable again (with pid 0000). You can even change the pid using ft_prog.

tested on win8.1

[linux-works]

http://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/2k0i7x/watch_that_windows_update_ftdi_drivers_are/clgviyl

I have managed to build the ft232r_prog program on linux but have not tried it yet.   I will use my 'broken' windows to verify my bad chip (or maybe 'ruin' a new one that I have as a spare) and then see if the linux app fixes it.  they say it works and I bet it does, but I'll try it myself just to see and report back.

interesting that ftdi has rolled back their bad image (2.12) and the download link on THEIR site now redirects to 2.10.  IANAL, but this seems like backpeddling to me, essentially admitting that they screwed the pooch and they don't want any more damage from this bad judgement call.

[Monkeh]

interesting that ftdi has rolled back their bad image (2.12) and the download link on THEIR site now redirects to 2.10.

No it doesn't.

[daveshah]

interesting that ftdi has rolled back their bad image (2.12) and the download link on THEIR site now redirects to 2.10.

No it doesn't.

The link has changed to the 2.12 executable now, but there was a point earlier today when it redirected to a zipped version of 2.10.

[Kjelt]

A MAC address is in its nature not unique nor does it needs to be. As long as you have one MAC address on a segment it works correctly. The IPV6 address needs to be unique if some one clones them you get a lot of problems.

How do you think a constrained device gets an IPv6 address in the IoT universe?
Answer: it is a direct substitute of its MAC address. So NO it is not allowed to have two devices with the same MAC address in this setting

[Chipguy]

This morning I didn't have the time to have a look at all the posts about that topic.
Turns out that the findings, namely pooving that the destruction of counterfeit chips was deliberate was already done!

Hat's up to you guys. Beside one troll that has already been banned this is a real on topic discussion.

We had a meeting at work today about that issue:
Our board assembler gets all the material from trustworty distributors.
However there is still a residual risk of having counterfeit mixed with genuine one. 

So we decided to slowly transition AWAY from FTDI because we deem them to be UNTRUSTWORTY from now on. 
The problem: They don't have a go at the fake manufacturers but at the customers who have already been betraid by the delivery of the counterfeit chips in the first place.
One product will be most likey be changed to Silicon Labs CP2110 or CP2104.

This means around 3000 pcs FT232R +  some others sold less for them every year.
There are now around 17K of these in our products out in the field somewhere.
I don't want to even think about the support line being unindated with calls when the Windows update installs new drivers.
As of now there are 0 reports. I really hope it stays like that. 
I work in a small company and we just can't take the risk of getting units back from far away because they are blown by a driver. 

[DarkStar]

To expand on this: What if FTDI sold some chips to a manufacturer and a year or two later held them hostage to pay over more licensing $$ or they would brick their devices!

By the way, I don't think anyone has brought this up yet.

How do we know that in the future this, or similar actions taken in FTDI's driver won't accidentally brick legitimate FTDI devices? I can easily envision a particular - maybe old - hardware version of one of their devices being left out of a test matrix and then suddenly FTDI (and their customers and customers' customers) are hoist by their own petard.

No, the risk is too great now to use FTDI chips - legitimate or otherwise - anymore.

[linux-works]

interesting that ftdi has rolled back their bad image (2.12) and the download link on THEIR site now redirects to 2.10.

No it doesn't.

The link has changed to the 2.12 executable now, but there was a point earlier today when it redirected to a zipped version of 2.10.

flip-floppers!

I did pull down the 2.10 via their 2.12 link, so it really did redirect for a while.  wonder why they changed it.

maybe one lawyer said to, but another said not to.  admitting they were wrong via the redirect?  can't have that!  so, tell that damned webmaster to redir the redir.  sigh...

[langwadt]

yeh, it used to be cp21xx that had a bad reputation because there were so many fakes and they constantly updated the drivers to break them so it seemed the they never worked 

Are you sure you don't mean the Prolific chip (PL2303)? 

The CP21xx (Silabs), I don't recall there ever being any problems with breaking drivers or known fakes. 

But the Prolific's did have those issues, however I don't think they intentionally broke drivers, but just that the new drivers didn't work with the fake chips, and they didn't actually go out of their way to reprogram the chips as FTDI has done.

You are right, it was the prolific I was thinking about

[uski]

We had a meeting at work today about that issue:
Our board assembler gets all the material from trustworty distributors.
However there is still a residual risk of having counterfeit mixed with genuine one. 

Thank you for your report.
I'm exactly on the same boat.
FTDI cannot hold the end user responsible for the whole supply chain.

[mikeselectricstuff]

WTF? I just noticed that the FTDI download for drivers is a setup executable, and you need to email them if you want to use custom VID/PID - what's that all about?
 
Is this a recent thing or has it been like that for a while?