Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 239 posts

Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone

#171

Post by foldr »

jstanley wrote: post #165
robomartin wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can play that game too. The fakes are so bad there is no telling if you are going to be able to reach 911 or, if you do, they don't report correct GPS coordinates. 9.2% of the people who call 911 never get through and 3.05% die. Even NADCAR races have a limited number of laps for a reason. We can go around and around this silly pile of hypothetical cases and lose complete sight of the fact that the root cause of th…

In this entire thread, you seem to be misinterpreting "fake chips are bad, but FTDI shouldn't brick them on purpose" as "fake chips are good, and FTDI is bad". That is why you are struggling to understand what everyone else is saying.

No, I think his point is that fake chips win by default if nothing can be done to disincentivize their manufacture and use. Law enforcement isn't cracking down on fake chips. So what else is FTDI to do if they're to survive as a business? You are fixated on what's best for the consumer in the short term, but the long term consequence of that could be that FTDI goes out of business and can't support any chips, fake or not.

Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone

#172

Post by feteru »

marcan_42 wrote: post #154
analog31 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, FTDI took some well deserved heat, but quickly discontinued this practice.

The really sad thing is that the FTDI clones worked better than the original ones. The original FT232R chips have a clocking bug that makes bitbang mode unusable for many applications, with no workaround (their errata sheet suggests a bullshit workaround of setting the clock speed to max, that is unusable in practice because USB can't keep up). It's supposedly fixed in a revision that I've never seen, and I believe t…

Wait so the bricker wouldn't even work on the clones? Or it only works on the clone because they don't have the FTDI checksum algorithm bug?

Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone

#173

Post by xxs »

robk wrote: post #142
jbay808 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the time, these struggles are invisible to those living in the US. It's similar with McMaster-Carr; typically an American hobbyist will ask why one would look anywhere else for hardware parts, not knowing that (at least for many years) they would only ship to corporate partners for orders outside the US.

This is the situation https://raptorsupplies.com specializes in, Getting high quality parts at relatively small order sizes shipped easily overseas at reasonable prices

I am not sure what you suggest - I tried finding something random and trivial: a decent 100uf, 400v capacitor (needed for a switching power supply primary) - zero. z0107 (low powered triac, 600v, 0.8A) - nothing. bt134 (another popular triac) - nothing. BQ24735 (Battery charger control chip) - nothing. 2n7002 (N-ch mosfet)...

I can safely say the site is not usable for electronics. It returned valves, pipes,nuts - pretty much useless for anything in Europe, being non-metric.

Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone

#174

Post by 0x0 »

robomartin wrote: post #129
erdo wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and fake Tesla just happens to be bricked while it's driving in the fast lane of a motorway, or is accidentally bricked because a bug triggered the kill switch. Think about that for a moment.

...and it never occurred to you that a hypothetical is just a thinking tool rather than an absolute. OK, I'll play your game. The car would not turn on after being parked somewhere for four hours. Only an idiot software developer would brick it at high speed on the Autobahn.

That's what FTDI did though. They pushed the malicious bricking driver through an automatic Windows Update to systems already running in production, no? That's pretty much the equivalent of going at high speed on the Autobahn.

Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone

#175

Post by ChrisRR »

as-j wrote: post #6

This 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…

This affects many suppliers where they see a cheaper source for their component and go for it.

You may be subject to it if you send your designs and BOMs to a PCB house who also source and populate the components, then you're at the mercy of their procurement process

Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone

#176

Post by feteru »

robomartin wrote: post #150
fulafel wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's productive to go around saying "an entire country is openly stealing intellectual property" here any more than citizens of other countries saying the same thing about US as a nation and personal data. IPR is a contentious field of intl agreements band there are no moral absolutes. But damaging physical property is pretty clearly unlawful in most jurisdictions.

You've never done business with China, have you? The scale and breath of intellectual property theft leaves one gasping for air. This isn't some kind of a secret. Anyone in manufacturing knows exactly what I am talking about. People who don't make physical products for a living have absolutely no idea. You can find clones of just about anything you can possibly imagine on Alibaba. Anything. That's a breath and scale…

breadth*

Wouldn't have corrected you if you didn't make the gasping for air pun with the typo.

Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone

#177

Post by avian »

toast0 wrote: post #105
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For someone in a country with VAT (e.g. Europe) this trick typically does not work since billing is different for companies vs. individuals.

Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone

#178

Post by makomk »

voltagex_ wrote: post #96
analog31 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, FTDI took some well deserved heat, but quickly discontinued this practice.

Both FTDI and Prolific have done this kind of thing. I switched to the CH340 a while back without any issues.

If I remember rightly, what Prolific did was worse in some ways because it rendered genuine but older-revision chips that they'd actually made non-functional with current drivers. (Also, some of the CH340 clones are genuinely really badly done and can't understand register writes that differ even slightly from what a particular version of the official driver sent.)

Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone

#179

Post by amelius »

Only slightly related but why do manufacturers have so much trouble printing the type and or value of the component onto the package? Often it's not even readable with a magnifying glass unless the lighting is from exactly the right direction.

Re: Your DS18B20 temperature sensor is likely a fake, counterfeit, clone

#180

Post by pantalaimon »

omgtehlion wrote: post #168
voltagex_ wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both FTDI and Prolific have done this kind of thing. I switched to the CH340 a while back without any issues.

how about cp2102? I prefer it to ch340, for no reason though ))

I found both cp2102 and ch340 seem to use less power too than ft232r. At least there are some boards I can power with the 3.3V output of the cp2102 and ch340 dongles, but which will brown-out with the old ft232r ones.
Post reply on HN