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

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

#221

Post by as-j »

jbay808 wrote: post #95
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…

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.

Depends on the country of course.

Last time I made heavy use of Digikey was in Australia and it worked really well. I'd order on Thursday and it would arrive by ~Monday, which was pretty awesome. You're right shipping, I remember correctly, was $20-$30, but on $200 of parts it was a small cost.

But as I said, this was done in my professional life, so I didn't blink an eye at it. Hobby world I get is different, but also the cost is frustration as opposed to 1000s, 10,000s of badly built boards.

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

#222

Post by robomartin »

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…

I've been using FTDI for, I don't know, twenty years. No problems at all. Also using USB solutions from other vendors (not FTDI clones).

> The original FT232R chips have a clocking bug that makes bitbang mode unusable for many applications, with no workaround

One of the problems with this situation is that if clones are allowed to permeate the market unencumbered the manufacturer of the genuine device might not have the financial capability to address problems and continue to innovate. Every single fake chip takes revenue away from the legitimate supplier.

Not arguing that your technical point isn't valid. It is. My point is that causing damage to the legitimate manufacturer by substituting their chips with clones has a non-zero non-trivial effect. Clone chip makers have zero interest and expend zero effort, time and money supporting the ecosystem they infect. All they care about is pushing their hardware and nothing else.

This also causes damage to consumers because it is impossible to know what issues fake chips might bring to the table across a wide range of vectors, safety and reliability being just two of them.

The better path is to take design wins away from FTDI and adopt hardware from legitimate part suppliers with solutions that meet your requirements. That's fine and that's how a healthy market works. Choosing fakes over legitimate parts hurts everyone. Today it's FTDI, tomorrow it could be your own products. Having experienced the "attack of the clones" myself, I can tell you this is not pleasant at all and it can, quite literally, destroy your company, costing jobs and your future.

Not a simple problem.

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

#223

Post by lnsru »

varispeed wrote: post #208
lnsru wrote: post #189

Once I was working for a company having single Motorola 68K based design. They were selling their ancient design without changes for decades. Motorola 68K disappeared from market, they moved to Coldfire, but then peripheral chips got obsolete. It was a big problem. Junior boss started buying everything he could find in Chinese Internet stores. Everything was fake!!! Sometimes parts were empty shells, no silicon insid…

How is it even possible to sell products with these parts if you are unlikely going to get RoHS certificates? That's like asking to go bankrupt.

These guys did other shady things balancing between unethical and criminal. I guess they would just deliver products with fake parts expecting to replaced them by redesigned ones in the future.

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

#224

Post by mindslight »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #92
mindslight wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No... there was a time when Maxim parts weren't really available through the major distributors. They had one of the most generous sample programs, but apart from that they seemingly wanted to draw you into some heavyweight direct sales process based around millions of parts per year. As the things I was designing were mostly aiming for quantities in the thousands, it made me not even bother considering their parts.

I'm wondering when that was. I remember basically always being able to get parts through normal distribution. Motorola microcontrollers on the other hand.

Around 10-15 years ago. Perhaps our different experiences were due to types of parts we wanted. Eventually I just avoided looking anywhere besides Digikey because the others' parametric searches were so terrible.

(Of course these days Digikey hassles customers by pointlessly firewalling arbitrary netblocks, so maybe the convenience tides are changing)

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

#225

Post by unnouinceput »

ajnin wrote: post #117
unnouinceput wrote: post #79

I don't get it. Why bother faking something that is very cheap to make genuine? I mean you pay peanuts for real deal, and you want to make something even cheaper then that?...why? Where is the profit?

First, when you make millions of a thing, then saving even fractions of a cent add up to a lot of money. Chinese manufacturers favor high volume, low margin products. Second, Maxim parts are not cheap, in fact they are among the most expensive in the IC industry. A single DS18B20+ goes for 3.47€ on Mouser right now. That's a juicy target for counterfeiters.

I don't know where you are, but in my country I paid the equivalent of 4 cents for DS18B20. I hook it up to my multipurpose Raspberry Pi and I use it to measure my room temperature. I bought 2 of them, for redundancy reasons when lockdown started. The other one is still in original package.

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

#226

Post by metaphor »

pravda wrote: post #114
metaphor wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood that joke to mean, "Maxim components are so expensive that the grey market is about the only place the layman can afford them in more than 1-off prototype quantities." At least that was my experience 8 or so years ago when I made the mistake of purchasing a lot of 100 MAX7219 off eBay for $100 shipped from China...$1/ea was such a tempting deal to a younger, more naive self when these chips were selling…

>I made the mistake of purchasing a lot of 100 MAX7219 off eBay Why was it a mistake? I've used the 'fake' ones. Did not have any problem with them.

The fundamental problem with counterfeits is that they aren't held to any published spec, so comparing your experience to mine isn't really meaningful...other than being not genuine, you can't generalize anything about counterfeits.

It was so long ago, I had to dig up notes.

On the performance side, the counterfeits I received couldn't be clocked anywhere near the 10 MHz limit specified by a genuine MAX7219; one package pin that should be tied to GND was floating internally (contributing to poor thermal performance); but the real showstopper was that intensity control didn't work for shit.

My records reflect nigelectronics on eBay as the counterfeit seller. This is the address I was instructed to return the counterfeits to when I called them out on it for a refund (I eventually got the refund, but threw these counterfeits in the trash where they belong):

  Cheng Kwok Hang
  15F, BLK 1, Aldrich Garden, 2 Oi Lai Street, Shau Kei Wan, Hong Kong
On the business side, I effectively wasted 10 days lead time in a tight pipeline just waiting for this garbage to arrive + more time/frustration isolating why the chips were failing initial tests; swallowed ~$700 out of pocket + expedited shipping for a single BOM line item to purchase genuine replacements from an authorized distributor; and looked like a complete hobbyist amateur to a collaborator in NYC (who was working on the mechanical side) as I had to explain why my stupid decisions meant he'll have to wait another 2 weeks before receiving the pre-production prototypes I had promised (which meant his clients ultimately had to bear that burden). Then there was all the manual rework which I didn't even keep track of.

This was my first semi-pro side gig out of college, and juggling all the unexpected curve balls with a fulltime day job was quite stressful.

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

#227

Post by robomartin »

DanBC wrote: post #151
panpanna wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that these devices came from legitimate sources with the right paperwork.

I find it hard to believe that anyone got traceability information with these fake devices. I can't understand how a component supplier would comingle their traceable stock. EDIT: since this is getting downvotes. A component supplier would destroy customer trust if they supplied fakes with traceability certificates. It would mean anyone building for aerospace or military or medical or mining or etc etc (all large, mu…

You are getting down votes because of the disconnect between those posting comments of voting and experience in the domain. The gap is massive and very visible. I have yet to see anyone come online to say "I make a million widgets per year and fake chips are not a problem at all". Easy for keyboard warriors to have an opinion without ever having had skin in the game.

They raise truly legitimate first approximation concerns about damage to consumers without understanding the long term damage to, again, consumers is far greater when a hard stance isn't adopted on fake hardware. It's the satisfaction of "doing the right thing" in the one case (FTDI) at the expense of never again being able to protect consumers from fake devices by disabling them if identified.

Counterfeiters continue to exist because they are allowed to make money. Stop their ability to profit and they will evaporate as quickly as they popped up. That's what everyone is missing, it's this feeling that the consumer was actually protected by forcing FTDI to pull back when, in reality, the mob created lasting damage to the safety, security and quality of consumer electronics products until someone else has the intestinal fortitude to make a stand, which, given the ferociousness of what is social media today could easily take decades.

Not only is it it a lack of understanding of how the electronics supply chain works, it also represents a lack of understanding of how the economics of fraudulent products works and how it is affecting people, companies and jobs globally.

We need to get very serious about intellectual property protection or Europe, the US and the world will be converted into nothing more than service and agrarian economies in a matter of decades.

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

#229

Post by Gibbon1 »

mindslight wrote: post #224
Gibbon1 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering when that was. I remember basically always being able to get parts through normal distribution. Motorola microcontrollers on the other hand.

Around 10-15 years ago. Perhaps our different experiences were due to types of parts we wanted. Eventually I just avoided looking anywhere besides Digikey because the others' parametric searches were so terrible. (Of course these days Digikey hassles customers by pointlessly firewalling arbitrary netblocks, so maybe the convenience tides are changing)

Makes sense, 10-15 years ago I was on walk about.

Digikey got it's opening when the mainline distributors decided that didn't want to deal with piddly little orders and imposed $250 minimums. Digikey swiped a bunch of their customers.

Now days ordering off Digikey is easy. But the cost of shipping is murder unless you want to wait a week plus for ground. Same time if you know what you want places like Allied will ship small orders for not much. And Jameco Electronics if they have it you can will call from their warehouse in Belmont.

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

#230

Post by voltagex_ »

analog31 wrote: post #220
omgtehlion wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Aha, I didn't know about the CP2102. Looks like I'll have to give one a whirl, and there's even a breakout board at Adafruit. I've used relatively few VCP adapters since I've been using microcontrollers with built-in VCP. I was nervous about the CH340 because the Windows drivers seemed to come from some weird place in China, but maybe US sourced drivers aren't any more of a comfort in these times.

If someone wants to quote me for a full reverse engineering of those drivers then I'd be interested in (crowd)funding it. But in terms of risks to worry about, it's pretty low down on the list IMO.
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