Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked | Hacker News Reader

Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked

downtowndougbrown.com

155 pointsjandeboevrie32 comments

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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

It'd be nice if it were 20-60$, but weren't USBee AX Pro more like $500 when they released them?

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

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.

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)

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?

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.

> 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.

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 :)

>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.

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.

I often ask myself this. I think of how much I (used) to pay for coffee & lunch each week, but balk at buying a game or tool.

It took years to convince myself to buy a coffee machine but I'm pretty sure it will pay for itself in less than a year. And I has no computers in it, so it is relatively simple to service and has less to go wrong with it so I'm hoping it lasts more than the usual 2 or 3 years.

And I take sandwiches for lunch.

I've thought about buying a coffee machine, but it seems like it might end up being a lot of dicking around with grinding beans, cleaning and maintenance.

I don't need another thing to clean and maintain.

Also the machines aren't cheap, maybe the cost of 200 cups of coffee.

So with the cost of beans, etc, I'd probably want it to last at least 2 years just to break even taking into account the inconvenience.

Just not sure I'd get the value out of it.

But it would be nice to get to the point where I could be guaranteed a really good coffee just how I like it every day.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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!

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.

These USB blasters are infamous.

There is a market for a generic, open hardware such device that actually works.

If you already had an RPI pico, couldn’t you use something like https://github.com/kholia/xvc-pico from the start?

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.

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.

> 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

A lot of good articles on HN get reposted to Lobsters, why should the inverse not also be the case sometimes?

> Not bad for a nights work

Jeez, it took me like a week just to program a usb hwmon temperature device for Linux

Get the $300 cable to avoid having to debug someone else's shoddy product?

The fourth paragraph in the article advises to buy the $69 cable.

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