FTDI chip only outputs 00's? Has anybody also seen this? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: cdwijs
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 03:31:12 pm
content: Hi All,I have used the FTDI FT232RL-REEL from farnell, order code 1146032.http://nl.farnell.com/ftdi/ft232rl-reel/ic-usb-to-uart-smd-28ssop/dp/1146032?ost=1146032&selectedCategoryId=&categoryName=Alle+categorie%C3%ABn&categoryNameResp=Alle%2Bcategorie%25C3%25ABnI have used these chips in the past, never had any issue with it. Now I have a new batch of them, and they seem to work, except the chip decides to not output the characters I send via USB, but rather output 0x00's.Has anybody else seen this with FTDI chips? Could it be I have a counterfeit chip?Kind regards,Cedric

author: Buriedcode
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 03:45:41 pm
content: A loop-back test would confirm whether or not its a fake chip, defective chip, or if you're doing something wrongConnect Tx to Rx, load up a terminal program, make sure you're selecting the right comm port, connect, and start bashing keys.Post your schematic and PCB as well because I guess we have no idea how you've got this wired up

author: cdwijs
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 03:51:34 pm
content: Thanks for the fast reply. I have held the atmega32 in reset, connected tx and rx together, send some numbers, and got a long line of 's back. Also my scope showed the pattern for a 0x00 being send.My schematic is attached.Kind regards,Cedric

author: enz
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 03:59:42 pm
content: I would bet that this is the culprit:Quote from page 8 (Table 3.3 Miscellaneous Signal Group) of the FT232RL datasheet:Pin 26, TEST: Puts the device into IC test mode. Must be tied to GND for normal operation, otherwise the device will appear to failMartin

author: cdwijs
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 04:10:39 pm
content: Thanks, I have missed that. I have re-tested with pin 26 tied to ground, but no change.An older FT232 with pin 26 floating does work as expected.Kind regards,Cedric

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 04:20:20 pm
content: Try it on Linux. If it works, I'd be willing to bet you've got fakes. Which from Farnell, is troubling.

author: cdwijs
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 04:42:17 pm
content: Thanks, it works under linux (linux mint under virtualbox with USB forwarding)This confirms I have a counterfeit chip, and it also confirms I will never build anything with FTDI ever again.Kind regards,Cedric

author: Bruce Abbott
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 04:54:29 pm
content: Don't blame FTDI for counterfeit chips, blame the Chinese criminals who manufactured and distributed them. You should send your faulty chips back to Farnell - I bet they won't be pleased to find out that they are fakes!

author: cdwijs
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 05:00:26 pm
content: Quote from: Bruce Abbott on March 21, 2016, 04:54:29 pmI think FTDI is not clean in this case. I don't like FTDI to pretend the chip is working, while in fact the driver is sabotaging the communication.I would have been OK with it if the chip didn't output any serial communication, and windows would have given me a nice big fat warning that this is a counterfeit chip, and that they refuse to talk to it. That would have saved me a few hours to hunt this down.Kind regards,Cedric

author: Delta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 05:13:04 pm
content: Oh dear. If E14 have been lumbered with fakes, who CAN you trust? :-(

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 06:08:20 pm
content: If you really believe it's not an error in your design, but instead you believe it's a counterfeit chip,what exactly was the response of Farnell after you reported it to them?

author: suicidaleggroll
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 06:12:46 pm
content: You could also ask FTDI if this is the expected behavior for a counterfeit device, considering it's working in Linux. If it is counterfeit, both FTDI and Farnell should be made aware of this problem so it can be rectified ASAP.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 06:30:09 pm
content: Don't think they are counterfeits. With latest iterations of the drivers I'm aware, it should output "NON GENUINE DEVICE FOUND", never heard about zeroes. Did you try to install different driver versions? Post a photo of the IC.

author: cdwijs
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 06:35:00 pm
content: Quote from: Karel on March 21, 2016, 06:08:20 pmI have told them today, so there's no reply yet. I'll keep you posted.Kind regards,Cedric

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 06:38:49 pm
content: Quote from: cdwijs on March 21, 2016, 04:42:17 pmNo it doesn't. There are proper ways how to check it.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 06:43:46 pm
content: Check eventsQuote

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 08:35:22 pm
content: Yes, please look at the event log of your Windows machine. Also: did you try to restart the Windows machine and try again? It could be good old Windows causing the problems.

author: TheCharels
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 08:57:53 pm
content: Quote from: cdwijs on March 21, 2016, 03:31:12 pmI am curious, that part number suggests a minimum order quantity of 2000 parts.How many of these FT232RL-REEL parts did you buy?

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 21, 2016, 09:12:43 pm
content: QuoteThat's just from the manufacturer. Most retailers (element14, digikey, mouser, etc) allow you to buy single quantities in cut tape or part-reel. Of course they charge more for the privilege.

author: wblock
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 01:56:22 am
content: Just bookmarking this thread to have handy for the next time the "FTDI is totally justified" people tell us that people only need to buy FTDI chips from reputable vendors to be sure they get the real thing.It is even remotely possible that this is a failure of FTDI's counterfeit detection in the driver, and it really is a genuine chip. That would be tragihilarious.

author: westfw
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 06:24:43 am
content: Well, since this is a not-seen-before behavior on the part of FTDI divers/chips/lookalikes, I think it's a bit early to be assigning blame on either counterfeit chips OR the FTDI countermeasures...(and this is a good demonstration of why FTDI needs to provide a "counterfeit detection/analysis utility" instead of just making their driver misbehave.)

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 12:57:10 pm
content: Quote from: westfw on March 22, 2016, 06:24:43 amhttp://zeptobars.com/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supereal%20this%20deep-downKnown behaviour from more than two years ago. How old is his driver?

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 01:04:14 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on March 22, 2016, 12:57:10 pmWhat is known? Where you heard about sending zeroes, especially 2 years ago? In that link FTDI rep says they aren't going to send zeroes.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 01:09:36 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on March 22, 2016, 01:04:14 pmQuote

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 01:16:47 pm
content: Ah, sorry. I'm ill right now and my brain is dull so translated English in some wrong way. Though this should be some really old driver as since then chips were just bricked and later non genuine string sent instead.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 01:32:58 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on March 22, 2016, 12:57:10 pmFor who didn't read the article: older FTDI drivers seem to send '0's when a fake chip is detected. IMHO this leads to the following conclusion: Farnell sold fake chips or FTDI's fake chip detection algorithm doesn't work correctly.

author: Kilrah
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 01:36:27 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on March 22, 2016, 01:32:58 pmNow if it failed on genuine chips that would truly become hilarious

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 02:16:10 pm
content: Quote from: cdwijs on March 21, 2016, 03:31:12 pmOddly enough this product is currently out of stock until the end of june 2016!

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 03:15:31 pm
content: Probably because OP wrote farnell about the issue and they decided that better be safe than sorry. As of OP, I don't see any effort to really check if they are fake or not, only opening another tread crying that FTDI is bad and he needs to chose something else.

author: cdwijs
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 03:35:20 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on March 22, 2016, 03:15:31 pmI have ordered the chips a few weeks ago, they were already out of stock at that moment.Kind regards,Cedric

author: westfw
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 04:09:56 pm
content: Quotehuh. According to the article, the "send zeros" behavior was the FIRST ftdi driver countermeasureThis was followed by the "brick the chip" behavior.And (currently) the "readable string" behavior. (which was SUGGESTED by the customer in that initial report!)Does anyone have a list that attaches driver behavior to driver version numbers? (Somehow, these "counterfeit mitigation changes" aren't mentioned in the FTDI release notes!)(and I guess the OP is running a short-lived 2y-old driver? Or is there a newer version that goes back to the zero-based behavior?)

author: f4eru
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2016, 08:10:06 pm
content: FTDI is unreliable shit at this point. Use the better alternatives.

author: Koen
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 30, 2016, 08:06:37 pm
content: Hello, it's been a week, have you received an answer from Farnell ?

author: cdwijs
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2016, 04:47:15 am
content: Farnell has asked me to send the chips back to them, and offered to send replacements.Kind regards,Cedric

author: bazsa56
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2016, 10:40:56 am
content: Hope you can update us on how this whole thing turns out eventually.We migrated away from the ft232rl recently, however some older designs might still use the chip and we woudn't want to get hit with a clone batch. Would be a major PIA. We do order stuff from Farnell among other reputable places. I can see that they do not have stock of the chip however.

author: Boomerang
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2016, 12:17:05 pm
content: This is really really bad for Farnell as well !!!They cannot guarantee that what you buy is what you will get eventually!

author: Ian.M
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2016, 01:24:11 pm
content: Please take good closeup photos of the chips and original packaging label(s) before returning them and post them here.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2016, 02:07:59 pm
content: Quote from: Ian.M on March 31, 2016, 01:24:11 pm+1I'm very interested in what the top & bottom of the chips look like!

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 31, 2016, 03:55:12 pm
content: Quote from: Boomerang on March 31, 2016, 12:17:05 pmOP so far made zero effort to check if they are really counterfeit. So it is completely unknown if they really are, and if vendor should be blamed.

author: bazsa56
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2016, 03:58:25 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on March 31, 2016, 02:07:59 pm+2Would be very interested in the chips. Most of the time you can clearly see that the marking on the top left is somewhat different then on a genuine. I do have 3 old adapters though which still work with new drivers but look sort of different then the ones we got from farnell or mouser, so who really knows what is going on with these...

author: Janne
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 31, 2016, 09:17:16 pm
content: I have some FL232's on order from Farnell. Will be interesting to see what I receive when their "receive your order the next day"-package arrives some time late next week..

author: adx
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2016, 06:15:43 am
content: This has happened to me (zeroes). I lost 3 days because of it, despite being burned by the PL2303 fakes affair. I really need to start my own blog and have a whinge so I'll leave that (mostly) to there!The upshot is the chip looks like a fake (with the pin 1 scallop offset towards pin 1), it's in an Arduino Nano "compatible" bought from eBay in 2013 when the price was high enough to not be suspicious, and I had no idea FTDI chips had been faked (and it worked fine). Hours of looking up error messages revealed nothing about these fakes. It probably happened when I upgraded to the latest Arduino, which bundles the latest FTDI driver. However after reverting to a 2007 driver, it's still outputting zeroes only, which implies to me it's been bricked to actually do that, or there is some residual driver component on my systems (all XP, at least that's all I've tested on) which I didn't manage to delete. I assumed it was the baud rate or some USB driver problem, and didn't twig to the fact that the comms might have been deliberately sabotaged, so along with ICSP programmer debugging, and the original battle (trying to get what I thought were tested devices working over RDP), it's taken a long time. I'm a long-time-ago FTDI customer (2005) and I don't like being deliberately sabotaged in undocumented ways, whatever their problems are.I probably shouldn't spend more time on the thing, but if I get around to confirming whether the device or driver is bricked on a virginal machine, I'll post back here. There are a couple of reports on the web about fake chips or the FTDI driver putting out zeroes so I think it is "a thing".- Antony.(PS I don't know what happened to my account, probably because I hadn't posted before - can't remember. But signed up again.)Edit: Added "compatible" to the Nano.

author: adx
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2016, 09:54:01 am
content: Well that was quick. Just confirming the fake chip works with version 2.0.0.0 of the FTDI drivers reports as being from 2006 installed on a FTDI-virginal XP laptop. Also, on an 'affected' XP machine, the latest version of the driver I had that comes with an uninstaller (FTDIUNIN.exe), version 1.0.2176.0 reports as being from 2005 (although the driver files are dated 2012), works after using the uninstaller then installing that driver, so I had just done a bad job of deleting the files (there are various files, not just ftser2k.sys). So the "zeroes" problem is, as this thread suggests, a function of a driver.Should I be posting this info? In an ideal world I would replace the chip with a genuine FT232 after having been warned by FTDI's nag screen or whatever and/or just found some genuine product and moved on. But FTDI deliberately and secretively made sure they cost me as much money and time as they could. Would I have done the same thing in their situation? I'd certainly think about it, but I don't think I would be able to bring myself to hate on my customers (or potential customers) that much. It's just the corporate way.

author: Rerouter
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2016, 10:14:07 am
content: Its a fair thing to post, at my work a $4000 tool was knocked out when then fake chip in it was knocked out, like the op even the company that made it wasn't aware they had a bad batch,In our case the device is epoxy sealed, so without swapping drivers we have zero chance of ever replacing the chip,

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2016, 04:27:19 pm
content: Quote from: Rerouter on May 30, 2016, 10:14:07 amJust wondering: how did the manufacturer of that $4000 tool react?

author: Rerouter
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2016, 08:46:17 pm
content: mainly very confused, and constantly telling us we had somehow bricked it, It wasn't until we data logged what was happening (had local echo, which was lucky), and dug up threads like this that they even believed us,We never got to speak directly to any people involved with the design or R&D, so i think they may still think we are spinning a tall tale.

author: Kilrah
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 04, 2016, 11:35:11 am
content: Quote from: adx on May 30, 2016, 09:54:01 amLook atDriver Store Explorer, it lets you remove cached drivers for good.Particularly useful for owners of Nvidia graphics cards who regularly update their drivers as well, since each version installs separately leaving the old one there, and each uses about 4-500MB of drive space.

author: adx
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 04, 2016, 12:39:02 pm
content: Quote from: Kilrah on July 04, 2016, 11:35:11 amNot for XP apparently, though it looks useful.I use "Device Remover" - it can be slow to log all devices (including unattached ones) but gives a good list of weird drivers that have been installed on the system and every USB device that's been plugged in since its early days (which for mine, is 2001, it replaced a system that had been 'continuously upgraded' since 1988!). From memory one of my hives under Windows 2000 had grown too big, it helped me fix that.However it didn't solve my FTDI problem (I'm pretty sure I tried it). I just did a poor job of removing the FTDI crud.