[HN Gopher] Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked
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Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked
Author : jandeboevrie
Score : 141 points
Date : 2024-06-09 02:13 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.downtowndougbrown.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.downtowndougbrown.com)
| gravescale wrote:
| Awesome.
|
| Reminds me of the time that an expensive Spectrum Digital XDS200
| probe didn't work on Linux, and then bricked while I was doing
| the firmware upgrade it said it wanted. SD said the only thing I
| could do would be return it to the US to be reflashed. The cheap
| clone worked out of the box, so that was nice!
| userbinator wrote:
| There are even cheaper clones based on the infamous Cypress (now
| Infineon) FX2LP which can also function as a logic analyser,
| signal generator, USB-parallel, or USB-serial adapter.
| rasz wrote:
| Why infamous?
|
| Btw Chinese company Corebai cloned FX2 and sells it as CBM9002A
| at ~$2.5 while Cypress is $4-16
| https://hackaday.com/2024/04/15/logic-analyzers-decoding-and...
| userbinator wrote:
| Infamous because USBee was the first to sell overpriced logic
| analysers based on the FX2 reference devboard, then Saleae
| did the same (a little less overpriced) but they both
| complained about all the clones, and tried to "FTDI them"
| which also caught their own original devices:
|
| https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/warning-about-usbee/
|
| That Corebai clone is interesting. They apparently also have
| a CBM9001A which is a clone of the Cypress SL811HS (the
| datasheet is a search-and-replace, they even forgot to do
| that to the PDF properties), and almost all their other
| products are marketed as "Replace" for ICs from big brands
| like Maxim and Analog Devices. I wonder if these are layout-
| RE'd clones or reimplementations --- I suspect the latter.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| You keep calling all those original devices overpriced, but
| what exactly makes them overpriced in your option?
|
| To me it's wild how (not singling you out specifically)
| well paid people have no issue paying on a daily basis 8$
| for a shitty cup of Starbucks or 18$ for a mediocre
| sandwich in London or California, stuff that you then piss
| and poop away, but asking them to pay 10$-60$ one time for
| a widget like an Original Arduino or a Salee, developed by
| skilled people that lasts you for life, that's suddenly
| overpriced.
|
| It's as if people expect electronic devices to only cost
| the sum of their wholesale parts, preferably at the
| manufacturing costs in a country with no workers rights and
| no IP rights, and ignoring the skilled labor that goes into
| the IP of the originals.
| tecleandor wrote:
| It'd be nice if it were 20-60$, but weren't USBee AX Pro
| more like $500 when they released them?
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Maybe they were I don' remember exactly, but you also
| have to put the price in the context of that era, when
| oscilloscopes were only available form the established
| manufacturers costing thousands of $, and before the era
| of community FOSS HW designs enabling devs to pool their
| knowledge for free.
|
| So even 500$ for a high quality hobbyist USB scope with
| good SW was considered affordable and definitely not
| overpriced. 500$ price was actually very disruptive to
| the established scope industry.
|
| And developing those 500 scopes and SW at western wages,
| doesn't come cheap, and since the SW was free, the only
| way to recoup the R&D and turn a profit was through the
| margins on HW sales
| NikkiA wrote:
| The era of $500 scopes arrived before USB, initially with
| the $700 or so Tek TDS210, the price rapidly falling from
| there as everyone clamoured for the garage engineer
| market.
| fragmede wrote:
| Sure but they cost a lot to develop and they need to
| recoup their costs. That doesn't mean they're overpriced.
| it means they're expensive, but they have to sell them at
| that price because they know it's only a matter of time
| before knockoffs come out and they have to lower prices,
| so they need to charge that much in order to not go out
| of business. It's a niche product to a small audience.
|
| The word overpriced is reserved for luxury items like
| designer anything, sunglasses, handbags, jeans, etc.
| they're able to be priced that way because of the brand,
| with no relation to how much it cost to make. (note: the
| price of an item and the cost or takes to make an item
| are decoupled. took a lot of years of business to learn
| that one)
| ashirviskas wrote:
| I don't see a difference there. If someone sells
| something without doing much innovation for over 10 years
| (doesn't matter if it is electronics or clothing), for
| much more than it costs to make, why is one overpriced
| and the other one is not?
| fragmede wrote:
| I suspect our disagreement is in the _much_ in "Without
| doing much innovation", and the difference (I am not a
| clothing designer though I've sewed my own clothes; there
| may be more to it than I imagine.) between electronics
| and clothing is that electronics have to change to keep
| up, with the times, which incurs a large expense. Human
| bodies haven't changed size so dramatically so as to need
| a whole new process to handle extra arms.
|
| There is a non-trivial amount of engineering work
| required to go from Usb 1.0, to 1.2, then 2.0, and then
| all the way to 3.0, even though to the end customer it's
| just updating to the latest version of USB.
|
| I see that non-trivial engineering cost as what makes the
| difference.
|
| Using a newer kind of fabric doesn't require new sewing
| machines.
|
| If you're able to make a product, and not change it for a
| decade, and also not change how it's being made for that
| same decade, _and_ on top of that, not have competitors
| pop up, then it 's overpriced.
| epcoa wrote:
| > There is a non-trivial amount of engineering work
| required to go from Usb 1.0, to 1.2, then 2.0, and then
| all the way to 3.0
|
| Yes, and this in the context of a thread about a device
| originally marketed by Cypress (Anchor Chips) as "EZ-
| USB". All this engineering work was done by Cypress for a
| device sold at a few dollars or so in quantity. Hardware
| wise most of these sig cap devices were reference designs
| clearly heavily using reference libraries.
|
| This isn't bad, but the whole point of these relatively
| expensive (compared to say a bare 8051) devices (which is
| literal pennies) is to save all this R&D money.
|
| It also isn't bad when someone takes this same off the
| shelf design and put it in a slightly shittier packaging
| and sell it closer to cost.
|
| This "infamous" line is silly as this microcontroller
| line existed nearly a decade before it became a thing in
| low-end/hobbyist sig cap devices. It originally was
| produced by a company called Anchor Chips in the late 90s
| and bought out by Cypress. It has been used in a lot of
| shit.
| daghamm wrote:
| Oh come on. All these devices are based on the Cypress
| reference design.
|
| USBee was sold for 1600, the software was crap. Saleae
| was sold for a couple of hundreds. The software was nice
| but unstable and limited. The "clones" that also use the
| reference design cost 10-20 and use the open source
| sigrok/pulseview software.
|
| Should also add that I don't live in CA, and don't drink
| coffee :)
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> Oh come on. All these devices are based on the Cypress
| reference design._
|
| And MacOS is based on the original BSD and Android is
| based on Linux. Doesn't mean you can't take something
| already existing then improve and polish it till you can
| monetize it. People are willing to pay for increased UX
| and polish.
|
| _> Should also add that I don't live in CA, and don't
| drink coffee :)_
|
| You weren't the point of this, but people who scoff at a
| few bucks for hardware when they spend a lot more than
| that on daily frivolities. You know there's plenty of
| them out there, even here.
| daghamm wrote:
| When I wrote "based", I meant it was pretty much a 1-1
| copy of a design by Cypress (although they have all
| evolved since than). I dont like the idea that one
| particular company should sell this for a shedload and
| anyone buying a cheaper device from elsewhere is doing
| something wrong.
|
| Saleae claimed that people buying "clones" use their
| desktop software without paying, which is a reasonable
| complaint. But with Sigrok around nobody is doing that
| anymore.
| monocasa wrote:
| > I wonder if these are layout-RE'd clones or
| reimplementations
|
| I have heard on the grapevine of several cases where these
| Chinese clone manufacturers don't use any of the original
| layout, but did put their hands on the original device's
| test vectors to design their reimplemention.
| rasz wrote:
| > almost all their other products are marketed as "Replace"
| for ICs from big brands
|
| Made in China 2025 plan
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 Subsidies
| for manufacturing/using locally sourced domestic
| components.
|
| Good example is this teardown of Deye SUN-5K-SG04LP1 5kW
| hybrid solar inverter
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0_cTg36A2Q. Brochure
| advertises top name brands, all Chinese clones (presumably
| high quality) substitutes inside.
| stavros wrote:
| I have one of those, it works great with the Saleae software.
| Mine is a few years old, I wonder if there are better clones
| out nowadays.
| bastard_op wrote:
| Yet another lobsters repost, but a good one. At what point do
| they just merge with HN?
|
| > I think what's going on here is if your device pretends to be
| an FTDI chip, but it doesn't perfectly emulate it, weird stuff
| happens when the official FTDI driver doesn't see something it's
| expecting. I'll leave it to you as the reader to decide whether
| that's accidental or intentional on FTDI's part. Whether it's
| accidental or not, I think it's pretty bad that the driver can
| crash the system if the device doesn't respond correctly.
|
| This particularly was a good comment. I guess this is what
| happens when vendors like FTDI have to fend of an army of chinese
| clones underselling their IP, introduce a BSOD in windoze driver
| when the chip isn't perfectly theirs.
| seventyone wrote:
| > At what point do they just merge with HN?
|
| Maybe they don't want to volunteer their time and resources to
| drive traffic to a venture capitalist's website disguised as a
| hacker community
| JDW1023 wrote:
| This is an impressive article. I'm not very familiar with
| hardware debugging, so I would have given up if I saw the exact
| same input yielding different outputs on the device in wireshark.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Great writeup. Author writes they had problems with a FTDI chip.
| While this time it might be unrelated to purposely defective
| drivers, it's worth recalling what happened years ago when FTDI
| decided to fight against clones by hitting their users.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innoce...
| snvzz wrote:
| These USB blasters are infamous.
|
| There is a market for a generic, open hardware such device that
| actually works.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| > Not bad for a nights work
|
| Jeez, it took me like a week just to program a usb hwmon
| temperature device for Linux
| jalk wrote:
| If you already had an RPI pico, couldn't you use something like
| https://github.com/kholia/xvc-pico from the start?
| dougg3 wrote:
| Hi, I'm the author of this post. I'm not aware of a similar
| Pico project that acts as an Altera USB Blaster clone. Seems
| like an interesting project idea though! The CH552 firmware I
| used would provide a good sample to start from.
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(page generated 2024-06-09 23:01 UTC)