> Reluctantly, he forwarded the question to their technical support, who never answered.
Because they don't know off the top of their heads and would have to test it to be sure which is a huge amount of work they don't have to do.
Because they don't know off the top of their heads and would have to test it to be sure which is a huge amount of work they don't have to do.
It’s more likely they just wouldn’t tell for whatever reason. A mass manufacturer probably doesn’t want to give an impression that they encourage a way of using the units not explicitly mentioned in the manual to avoid any complaints/lawsuits. Also, some companies require tech support staff to respond to a certain minimum number of tickets per hour (effectively penalizing personnel for doing anything beyond provided checklists, which consulting part specs definitely would be).
That, or they may have a product line which is designed for that usage case, and they don't want to hurt its sales.
Tech support staff might not have a test bench at hand at all times (and an Arduino unit out of the blue might’ve required a month to approve and purchase), but they don’t need any equipment to pull specs for a part from internal documentation, which support staff must be very adept at scanning by the nature of their job. I believe this is what tech support more or less for, in a better world.
They probably had an answer at their fingertips without any need for testing, but communicating it was against their/company’s interests.
This is when having contacts inside a company helps. Either be a big enough customer to warrant their attention by default, or make friends with the company rep when she calls or stops by. If you aren't a large enough customer to have either of those options available to you, then you get the attention they feel you are worth as an end user.
And that's called... poor customer service.
Had I been faced with that behavior and had the freedom to switch vendors as OP I would have -- meaning that support behavior isn't without flaw, they lose a certain threshold of customers.
I’d never in a million years expect a company to do my R&D/integration work for me when I’m buying one mass-produced consumer item and using it outside of its intended use-case.
And often support people give wrong info, you may eventually find a vendor that just says "Sure you can do that" and then you get it and find out you cant.