These acerbic comments make me feel like on Hackaday instead of Hacker News.
Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone
101–110 of 239 posts
Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone
#102I've bought ~100 of these sensors from ali and ebay and 9/10 had troubles reporting temperatures in passive mode reliably. However simply repeating requests until sensor reports a valid value (!=+85C and !=-127C) works fine. Rarely I've seen sensors not working in passive mode at all. Still, I always recommend running an extra +VDC wire (3 wires vs 2 wires isn't a big inconvenience). When running large 1-wire buses (…
> However simply repeating requests until sensor reports a valid value (!=+85C and !=-127C) works fine. You know you're dealing with counterfeits and you know they're unreliable, but you've somehow convinced yourself that despite all the uncovered variance sitting on the table, if you keep poking long enough until the component returns some non-edge-case value, then it "works fine". I must have hopped on the sanity t…
> You know you're dealing with counterfeits and you know they're unreliable, but you've somehow convinced yourself that despite all the uncovered variance sitting on the table, if you keep poking long enough until the component returns some non-edge-case value, then it "works fine".
Yes? Because it usually does? If you test a bunch of fakes and they tend to be either basically accurate xor really inaccurate, and your project isn't super critical, why not? It's like unit testing; if you trust your tests, then any function which passes is probably fine to use. I wouldn't do it for something mission-critical, but for fun hobby stuff I probably would.
Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone
#103This affects temperature sensors/parts bought from un-official distributors like ebay or AliExpress, not digikey, farnel, etc. Perhaps I've been too lucky in my career and practiced EE for work, but who would you ever go to ebay instead of digikey?? Digikey certainly has a premium, but their speciality is small numbers/cut tape/etc and they have a small order size which makes them ok for hobby work, and I've used the…
I live outside the US. Both Digikey and Mouser will charge me $20+ to ship anything (tried with a small capacitor). Farnell will let me put stuff in the shopping cart, then when I select "individual" as the customer type, tells me that they only ship to companies and redirects me to a "partner site" for individuals, which promptly fails to load (things like this have conditioned me to avoid official distributors). RS…
At least they're willing to ship to you. I can't order anything at all from these larger suppliers, most of them decided that my country does not exist (you can't find it in their lists). Of course, one can always order through an intermediary, with their 80$+ shipping.
Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This anti-consumer behavior on behalf of companies I strongly disagree with this. I see no way to rationalize that a company should be responsible for ensuring that counterfeit devices work correctly by releasing drivers that are tolerant of them or do not stop them from functioning. FTDI's products are the combination of their hardware with their drivers. Both are required in order to delivery functionality and re…
I agree that anyone who built a device and knowingly used a counterfeit FTDI chip deserved to be punished. However, the FTDI debacle didn't punish those people, they're not the consumers. It punished end users who have no idea what an FTDI chip is or does or that one exists in the products they buy. In your airliner microcontroller example, you have much more informed consumers. They could reasonably be expected to k…
@LeifCarrotson
You are making the mistake of taking a hypothetical and arguing against it. These are contrived examples designed to communicate a concept rather than an absolute reality that one should argue against.
I'll just say that it is very common to see comments relating to hardware issues on HN from people who obviously don't have experience building hardware at scale. And so, it is hard to discuss these things due to the asymmetry of knowledge and experience.
Any non-trivial hardware development and manufacturing operation has or should have professional supply chain management. It is their responsibility to ensure they build product as designed by engineers. If the hardware engineer specified an FTDI chip he or she did not mean "anything that is labeled similarly to FTDI". No, they meant to design in an FTDI chip. Anything else could fail or perform differently at any time.
Blame for the bricking of devices given a change of driver code isn't with FTDI, it is with whoever manufactured the product that was supposed to use FTDI chips and did not.
Let's also mention the very real potential for someone knowingly using clone chips in order to save money.
It is preposterous to charge the chip manufacturer with this responsibility.
There could be many tentacles to this kind of an issue, but the manufacturer ensuring that their drivers only work correctly with their chips isn't anti-consumer at all, quite to the contrary.
Yet another angle: The crappy clone manufacturer --who could not care less about the consumer-- make a bad chip and it is the responsibility of the legitimate manufacturer to write the drivers and ensure it works well? In what alternate reality is that reasonable or required?
Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone
#105This affects temperature sensors/parts bought from un-official distributors like ebay or AliExpress, not digikey, farnel, etc. Perhaps I've been too lucky in my career and practiced EE for work, but who would you ever go to ebay instead of digikey?? Digikey certainly has a premium, but their speciality is small numbers/cut tape/etc and they have a small order size which makes them ok for hobby work, and I've used the…
I live outside the US. Both Digikey and Mouser will charge me $20+ to ship anything (tried with a small capacitor). Farnell will let me put stuff in the shopping cart, then when I select "individual" as the customer type, tells me that they only ship to companies and redirects me to a "partner site" for individuals, which promptly fails to load (things like this have conditioned me to avoid official distributors). RS…
> tells me that they only ship to companies
You often just need to fill that form entry, and not have any sort of official company. Things like Self, or your name again will work just fine. I have a fake company name that one day I'll need to actually register, but in the mean time is used whenever someone is willing to take my money, but not provide service without a company name.
Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another professional EE here. I never expect random chips bought off AliExpress/eBay/Amazon/etc to work, much less be genuine. I do expect breakout modules and the like to work, though I don't expect them to contain genuine parts. (That implies I'd never source from these places when it's a critical function.) I'm always surprised when people expect grey-market crud to perform just as well as top-dollar stuff....
I do electronics as a hobby. I sometimes buy chips from very dubious shops in China for fun. Some of these sources are sketchy even by Taobao/Aliexpress standards. Then I decap the chip by boiling the package in acid and inspect the die under a microscope. More than half of them are genuine. I get some nice surprises because even the chips that I expect to be absolutely fake can turn out to be genuine. So far I've se…
they also may be refurbished ie unsoldered off a board. that happened to me a few years back for a bunch of soic op-amps I was having difficulty sourcing.. they worked ok though.
Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that anyone who built a device and knowingly used a counterfeit FTDI chip deserved to be punished. However, the FTDI debacle didn't punish those people, they're not the consumers. It punished end users who have no idea what an FTDI chip is or does or that one exists in the products they buy. In your airliner microcontroller example, you have much more informed consumers. They could reasonably be expected to k…
>People don't know what their packaging is made from or who it's made by. They have no way to verify it prior to purchase, and even after purchase, it would take an expert to identify. For food, you can't change the game without prior notice, but if it is clear that faked goods are toxic, people would start buying from trusted providers themselves. For electronics, I don't see a problem. If a device is bricked, go to…
The counterfeit FTDIs are ok. How drivers are created is a much bigger problem, the windows model specifically where hardware takes a long time, if ever, to be included in the default installation.
Getting hardware to just work on windows was a mess (not sure if they have corrected this).
Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone
#108I have one of these, purchased from Adafruit - they're not an authorized distributor but they're certainly reputable. My unit works fine but I haven't tested it yet... anyone else bought from them?
Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone
#109This affects temperature sensors/parts bought from un-official distributors like ebay or AliExpress, not digikey, farnel, etc. Perhaps I've been too lucky in my career and practiced EE for work, but who would you ever go to ebay instead of digikey?? Digikey certainly has a premium, but their speciality is small numbers/cut tape/etc and they have a small order size which makes them ok for hobby work, and I've used the…
I live outside the US. Both Digikey and Mouser will charge me $20+ to ship anything (tried with a small capacitor). Farnell will let me put stuff in the shopping cart, then when I select "individual" as the customer type, tells me that they only ship to companies and redirects me to a "partner site" for individuals, which promptly fails to load (things like this have conditioned me to avoid official distributors). RS…
I hear you, and even in the US it is a problem in Hawaii and Alaska. I live in the former and just yesterday was look at a part that was 8oz total and the site added a $100 HI, AK surcharge on shipping!!! This is mostly a UPS problem as for many suppliers they give great 48 state rates but anything else is horrible.
Now I wouldn't mind this nearly as much if I could get the shipping rate upfront but it seems 80%+ of sites won't give you a real rate until you have almost completed check out which takes a lot of time. The funny thing is if they have a phone number you sometimes can get them to ship it more reasonably if their system has the flexibility to do that.
This is where ebay is a godsend as a lot of sellers will have the odd part around and work at having cheap shipping. But it is caveat emptor.
Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This anti-consumer behavior on behalf of companies I strongly disagree with this. I see no way to rationalize that a company should be responsible for ensuring that counterfeit devices work correctly by releasing drivers that are tolerant of them or do not stop them from functioning. FTDI's products are the combination of their hardware with their drivers. Both are required in order to delivery functionality and re…
Let's work through this example. You're a manufacturer of devices using FTDI chips. You make an emergency system for airplanes which e.g. releases breathing equipment, or life rafts, or similar. Or a backup avionics system. Due to a supply chain slip-up, a small number of counterfeit devices slipped in. An emergency comes up, and the instant the emergency system comes up, it turns out to have been bricked. People die…
You are making the mistake of arguing against a hypothetical. It's just a fabricated example to convey an idea, not something to argue against. As an aerospace engineer I assure you that sourcing components for aerospace isn't as simple as your hypothetical to my hypothetical.
> Pro-consumer would be a pop-up letting the user know they received a counterfeit devices.
This from driver code?
The party at fault here is whoever sourced the devices. If the design engineer called for FTDI and they put in FunTDI instead, well, they didn't build what they were contracted to build. Period.
Something as simple as a driver revision to, for example, improve performance, could break a fake chip. Is the legitimate manufacturer supposed to now be aware of every fake and design their drivers forever more to ensure fakes work perfectly? C'mon, that's preposterous.
If I design a board and someone decides to use a cloned version in their machine and somebody gets killed because of a software update I can assure you that the case wouldn't even get to court. The instant it is discovered that the board was a fake the entire thing would be thrown out. There is no way anyone is going to hold the manufacturer responsible for ensuring that clones work property. That is not what they are in business to do.