New FTDI drivers are reportedly bricking counterfeit chips. FTDI chips are USB<->serial converter chips that are commonly found in a variety of devices including ham radios. If you radio contains a knockoff chip, intentionally or not, it could destroy the ability to hook the radio to your computer.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/10/22/185244/ftdi-reportedly-bricking-devices-using-competitors-chips

I know what shitting a brick means, but what does "bricking a chip" mean?

It means turning the piece of hardware into a brick, removing all functionality from the device.  Prolific had the same problem, so everyone quit buying Prolific.

What the chip makers need to do is not punish the end users, but to have the drivers report back to the chip maker with the name and model # of the hardware manufacturer, and then the chip maker needs to bill or sue the hardware maker.

Damn Chinese thieves and damn Nixon for opening the festering puss hole up to the rest of the world.  We need to just boycott China.

Thanks.  I'm back in the loop, now.

NOT, repeat NOT going to brick the radio.  It might brick the USB adapter, but that's it.  The radio does not have a FTDI device.

Buy a good USB adapter and you are back in business.

How can you tell if you have an FTDI device?
I want to avoid them just to keep from having any problems.

I think you want an FTDI device with the proper drivers. I got a Chinese knock off programming cable for my Kenwood TM 261A about 3 years ago. Down loaded the driver from their web site. Yep, the driver disappeared in a computer upgrade. When I went to use it again I couldn't find a driver and had to get a new cable that used an FTDI chip and driver. FTDI drivers are made in the USA, have no fear.
73,
Rob

Do the icom 7200 and kenwood ts 590 use ftdi or prolific?

I'm pretty sure the icom's USB identifier unique and not FTDI's, and from
what I read it's only FTDI attacking fake chips identifying as FTDI, so probably not a problem.

Right the radio itself will remain usable, but if the radio has a counterfeit FTDI chip internally the new drivers would kill the chip and disable your USB interface to it.

Counterfeit chips sometimes do make it into legit products.

I know Kenwood specified a specific driver, might even have been FTDI, for the TS-590, and said not to try and connect to the radio before that driver was installed. In other words the major manufacturers are set up to use well recognized drivers. If you got a bad chip right off the bat it would be a warranty issue.
73,
Rob

1) the clone device is not permanently bricked; you can use an FTDI eeprom utilty to rewrite the USB vid/pid fields.
this thread,
http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=270175.0
contains details on what tool you need, where to get it, and how to go about unbricking a clone device.  

2) i'm at sixes and sevens with this issue; FTDI is suffering from fly-by-night APAC-region companies cloning (via reverse engineering) their devices, and they have a right not to make their driver compatible with counterfeit devices.  i'm sure that folks at FTDI looked at all the possible ways NOT to have the driver compatible, but this chosen approach certainly got everyone's attention.

3) the consumer electronics market is rife with counterfeit components.  it's difficult to ascertain what you are buying.  my company buys hundreds of millions of dollars of parts per year and the mid- to low-end stuff is always tough to police.  capacitors, inductors, even CPLDs.  worse yet is "upgrading".  for example: you take a RAM device with a given CAS latency, and remark it and resell it as if it has a lower CAS latency (lower = better = more expensive).  now then, the original part vendor spec'd the device CAS latency a valid over the full operating temperature range, say 0'C to 70'C.  the remarked part may meet the lower CAS latency at room temperature but not so much at the two extremes.  so this issue may not be caught during validation tests before manufacturing.  the next thing you know you have thousands / tens of thousands of units out in the field when you discover the RAMs aren't really what they have been marked as.  

ar-jedi

The Icom IC-7200 and other Icoms with built-in USB (7410, etc) use Silicon Labs chips internal to the radio.

To see how widespread counterfeit parts are, and the problems they cause, some years back motherboards from
the major computer manufacturers (and other devices), began suffering failures due to the electrolytic capacitors
exploding and spewing corrosive electrolyte around inside the computer.  This was not repairable.  HP, Dell, Gateway,
all of the majors had this problem.  

http://www.badcaps.net/pages.php?vid=4

One of the capacitor manufacturers had some employees steal the electrolyte formula and leave, starting their own
company, making counterfeits.  Only problem, they didn't get ALL of the formula.  They missed the part that kept
it from drying out over the long term.  They faked not only their former employer's caps, but those of other manufacturers
as well.

Same thing goes on with fake transistors, all kinds of parts.  This goes on in just about every industry.  A huge problem.

Why how Spectra of them...

I haven't run into the FTDI issues mainly because of 1 main reason...I buy all my cables as serial when it comes to radio equipment.

There is also counterfeit cisco equipment on the market that has made its way into reputable channels. Its become an issue

There's something to be said for this. "off-lease" or used towers/laptops that have a serial port can usually be had locally for under $50 these days, and help with all sorts of random ham radio hookups - programming cables, TNCs, digital interfaces, etc. Serial cables just work, no drama with drivers.

A PCI-e seral card costs $15. The USB RS-232 adapters literally cost more. Serial still dominates the commercial radio market…

Best to buy TTL - Serial adapters (which are the radio to serial port cables) and stick with one USB-serial adapter.  This way, it's always the same com port, and you know it works.



FTDI are great chips, work with every OS, and are very stable.

Prolific generally work just fine, way more fake ones out there.

WinChipHead seem to work fairly well, have one plugged into my netbook now to talk to my TNC.



This whole "make everything USB" craze is stupid.  Most of them are just USB - Serial - TTL adapters anyway.  Stick with a quality adapter, and everything serial will work well with it.

finally a use for those dusty old ABCD serial switches

Arg. This issue has been a thorn in my side for years. A lot of the equipment I work with still uses -232 interfaces. At best the prolific parts were tempermental, but in the last few years I haven't been able to find any USB-serial cables that would work. I tested a stack of them and found that they would blue-screen my win 7 PC, anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour after they were plugged in. I suspect Prolific wrote their driver to do so once a counterfeit chip was found.

A colleague told me about Keyspan adapters, but I found them no more usable. Moxa's are good, but expensive and they aren't set up for retail sales.

Then I found these: Roll your own FTDI

They are rock solid on a PC, and work with the native drivers on Mac and Linux. And the price is right. They also make TTL versions for rolling your own radio interfaces.

This same thing happened with the fake prolific chips when they came out with new drivers --you had to use the old drivers to get the cables to work





 

A second for Valley Enterprises, I got my cable for the TM 261a there. 73, Rob

FTDI has decided to revise their software that was intentionally bricking fake FTDI chips. I think they were afraid of a class action lawsuit.

http://www.ftdichipblog.com/?p=1053