Installing FTDI drivers?

For OS X Mavericks (10.9) Apple apparently developed their own drivers for

The procedure is documented here:

Note that the drivers on the FTDI download page show latest compatibility as Lion (10.7) but reports are that they are working with Mavericks and

FYI

It may be a moot point - the last couple of versions of real Arduino boards don't use FTDI chips. They use an Atmega chip with a USB interface.

Have you visited the Arduino site ?? You would be safe enough with stuff from there.

FTDI

river

Making drivers that do not work on fake chips is a good thing.

Just hope you do not have fake FTDI chips in your stuff.

Find out first if it's fake, then proceed when you find out it's not fake.

"just hope"?

How do I find out if it is fake, exactly? We got an unusually good deal on FT232R from RS components in the UK. They were half the price they were normally, we built them in to a few hundred instruments that sell for $10,000 each. Were they fake? Are they all going to get permanently bricked with the next windows update? From our customers point of view, how are they supposed to know whether the instruments have fake chips before they buy them? *I* don't know, and I bought the chips!

No more FTDI for us.

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Then make your own drivers that do not zero-out the ID in your chips.

I am sure your argument is with your vendor if yours are fake chips, not FT DI.

half price? 1st clue

But that would have required me predicting that FTDI would ever have done such a stupid, self-destructive thing.

And it would be very hard for us since we would need to figure out the chip internals, windows driver details, driver signing, passing microsoft hardware compatibility testing etc. etc. The *whole point* of FTDI is that they are for those who do not want to write their own drivers! Otherwise we could have written our own USB code in the microcontroller from the beginning and saved the $2.

My argument would be with both. And where would that get me? You think either of them would refund the $millions? RS would refund the price of the chips if I was lucky, same with any other distributor.

RS UK are not some grey-market bottom feeder. They are one of the top component distributors in the UK, *the* top one historically, they were the first major one AFAIK. They are historically overpriced, concentrating on smaller users. In fact they started selling to one-man-band TV repair shops and the like. RS = "Radio Spares". But in recent years they occasionally want to try a lot harder and will do volume quotes that are competitive for some lines.

But I should always insist on paying their list price, right? And that will help?

In fact I think we are OK, we had no problem reports during the time the drivers were live. I believe the chips were genuine, I have no problem with RS and I think we just got a good deal.

FTDI pulled the update after the backlash (although I don't know how things have changed since then). But the possibility remains they could do it again *at any time* in the future and potentially brick millions of dollars worth of products.

We would never be safe.

stall FTDI

FTDI driver

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ownload

fake.

Yep, it's a way-touchy situation, what with the apparent destruction of fak e chips and all.

If your outfit is reputable, most likely you just got a really good deal.

Are your ICs Laser-Etched nomenclature labeling or printed?

If printed, start crying.

If not, good on ya, probably real FTDI chips. yay

Sorry to be a butt about this, but I am the go-to guy at Windows 7 Driver T esting for Technical Beta (now known as Preview) folks.

One guy submitted a bug against the drivers for an amateur radio device tha t happened to use an FTDI USBRS-232 converter IC.

He insisted the drivers come from FTDI for this 'oddball' unit that maybe s old a few thousand planet-wide, which is way below the bar for getting a fi x for the drivers inbox for distribution on Windows 7 RTM various SKUs' med ia, both Retail and for the OEMs.

So the bug gets bounced back to me as Won't Fix "Too Few Customers" and I j ust went ape-shit, knowing this is just the tip of the iceberg for the driv ers for this literally _billions_ of other FTDI USBRS-232 IC customers.

So as per my usual, took it to the boss and said hey this is huge, make the m fix it, and he said SHIT & SHINOLA, Rich! You got a big one on the line here.

So he jammed it back down devs' throats and they fixed it and the rest of t hem also.

So the FTDI drivers made it 'inbox' for Win7 RTM, yay.

Anyways, sad but true, these are times of WAR on way too many channels and FTDI went to war on this one.

FAKE ICs MUST DIE!

And FTDI changes the Dev ID for Fake Chips and that is that.

You can program it back in the chip and modify the inf to make it work, sup posedly.

But who'd trust a Fake FTDI IC?

Maybe a real CH340 from WCH in Nanjing is better?

They are all out in product now but I did not notice anything wrong with them at the time.

Really? Thank for dropping by.

In my experience it always has to go online and download them "windows update" but perhaps we modified the config registers or something.

They are not allowed to do that since they are not a nation-state...

...specifically, I am pretty sure that intentionally destroying a competitors product is a crime in most places. Especially when it is "with a computer" which seems to elevate the offense these days and bring in laws introduced in the name of national security but used to prosecute j.random.hacker. For sure if a private individual did it they would be in jail. FTDI can make all the arguments they like about intellectual property but that does not give them the right to extrajudicially damage end-user equipment.

Probably why they pulled back on it so quickly.

Nice!

Bought some just for fun, see if they work with linux, might be useful for development.

That's what I'm thinking. I bought some lowest price "Prolific" adapters on eBay and was surprised to find they didn't work with the Prolific drivers. That was about the time the counterfeit thing caught my attention with the issue that Prolific only supports their newer chips (not yet cloned) under Win8 as a means of squeezing out the clones. I complained to the vendor and got my money back, but the irony is that the CH340 works everywhere and anywhere with no problem once you have the right driver from WCH.

So at this point I'd say WCH is the go to guy for USB232 chips... unless you have a problem with the drivers not being automagically downloaded and installed. I think I had to search for them myself. If they fixed that I would leave Prolific and FTDI behind.

Thanks

I probably won't be installing vendor binaries in linux just for that but it looks like the chip is becoming popular after the FTDI debacle. I expect it will be in the mainline kernel shortly (if it is not already).

John Devereux schreef op 06/07/2015 om 09:28 AM:

That is also my viewpoint. I'm designing out all FTDI devices. Not only because of the driver problems but also due to stability issues.

Why not SiLabs CP2101 or CP2102

AFAIK they have never messed with the drivers.

I agree. From my experience the CP210x devices are also more stable when using them on the bench when connecting/disconnecting to a target. With the FTDI chips I need to unplug/plug when I switch my bench PSU on or off.