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FTDI Driver Breaks Hardware Again (eevblog.com)
janoc writes: It seems that the infamous FTDI driver that got famous by intentionally bricking counterfeit chips [NOTE: that driver was later removed] has got a new update that injects garbage data ('NON GENUINE DEVICE FOUND!') into the serial data. This was apparently going on for a while, but only now is the driver being pushed as an automatic update through Windows Update, thus many more people stand to be affected by this.
Let's hope that nobody dies in an industrial accident when a tech connects their cheap USB-to-serial cable to a piece of machinery and the controller misinterprets the garbage data.
Let's hope that nobody dies in an industrial accident when a tech connects their cheap USB-to-serial cable to a piece of machinery and the controller misinterprets the garbage data.
I don't know why this is happening to USB to Serial drivers, of all things, because even worse shit happens with Prolific chipsets. Prolific did a hardware refresh and then instantly obsoleted all of the previous generation chips. Otherwise not a problem, except if you use Windows 8 or newer then the fucking driver they issue causes a code 10 hardware. If you use an older on 8 or newer then they work fine, but stupid Windows Update keeps replacing it with the bad driver unless you use a bit of ini file hackery.
What makes this worse than the FTDI situation is that Prolific is doing it to their own hardware to force you to buy a new one.
Here's the safe driver, in the form of source code so you could check it yourself if you want to.
http://lxr.free-electrons.com/...
This driver does require a non-crap operating system, of course. Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc probably OSX will work too.
Why would a vendor of a basic USB-Serial port converter bother writing a driver?
Because the FTDI chip actually works. It's one of the very few USB to Serial chips that has proper timing and signals to make it work with marginal, antiquated hardware. A lot of people trying to use old automotive scan interfaces and the like which interface with serial have serious problems when using other chips.
I have literally never had a USB device outside of HID or mass storage which didn't need its own special snowflake driver, even though USB has driver profiles for several types of device.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
MCP2221, CH340G, etc. Just see:
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/r...
So, your problem may well be that you have a counterfeit "Prolific" chip that Prolific's driver no longer plays nice with.
No, that's not the problem at all. You can read yourself from Prolific's website:
http://www.prolific.com.tw/US/...
Note on that page how they no longer support "EOL chipsets" even though they work fine in windows 8 and 10 if you simply use an older driver that doesn't care about what OS version you have. If you use a newer one though, the driver throws a code 10 error so it won't work, unless of course, it detects a non-EOL chipset.
FTDI is malware.
Use Linux.
use MCP2221.
aaaaaaa
'Compatible' chips that report FTDI's USB Vendor ID (VID) and Product ID (PID). That way, they don't have to actually write their own driver and get it approved by MS.
So, when Windows interrogates the device, it appears to be FTDI, so Windows loads the FTDI driver.
That driver makes an undocumented call that only genuine FTDI chips will respond to correctly, so the driver can tell whether a knockoff part is attached.
Other legit serial chip makers use their own PID/VID, so it's not an issue with TI, Silabs, etc., only with 'Best Lucky Interface Ltd' parts.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
One problem these counterfeit chips pose is that all the sudden companies like FTDI end up with a lot of support costs for people who bought shoddy products with the fake chips, which often don't work nearly as well as the real thing. This is a way for FTDI to crack down on the counterfeit chips. While it sucks for the consumers that end up with the fake chips, it will also help put a stop to the counterfeit chips since any product that uses them will not work.
At my company we make a number of development boards using the quad FTDI chips for the serial interface. We use them because in addition to RS232 they also can talk I2C and JTAG, among other things. I can reliably run the FTDI chips at 10Mbps. I've used other USB to serial devices in the past but I've had lots of problems with them. Some cables I bought, for example, will just suddenly stop working and I have to periodically reset the baud rates.
Why should FTDI have to bear the burden and support costs of counterfeit chips? If somebody else slaps the FTDI manufacturer ID and product ID onto their USB device then they deserve whatever happens. Why should FTDI have to spend resources supporting fake chips? By doing what they are doing, it will drive the fake chips out of the system and prevent future ones.
I work for a chip manufacturer and while there's a very low risk that someone will make fake chips like ours (very complex network processors), we have had to add features to our chips so that our end customers can prevent counterfeit equipment which just copies their software. We have some large customers who have been battling Chinese made counterfeit equipment.
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