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> The English-language product brief implies that “SR” stands for “Supereal”; that brand name comes up in the context of counterfeit FTDI FT232RL chips that plagued the industry some time ago.

This wording is misleading because it implies the fake chips were the plague. The fake chips worked fine, and it was FTDI's official driver that intentionally ruined peoples' working hardware when they detected the fakes and changed their PID to 0000 so they would no longer be recognized: http://www.rei-labs.net/changing-ftdi-pid/




> The fake chips worked fine

Some of them did. I had some that did weird things with the CBUS pins.


as someone with no connection to this can you elaborate?


They were also a plague because they introduced uncertainty and had spread and contaminated devices across a wide range of devices. Silently counterfeited devices are not OK.


They wouldn't have had to pretend if FTDI would have let them be a second source. I am sympathetic toward wanting to have the support of an already-widely-distributed driver rather than get stuck in the chicken vs egg of being unable to break in to a market because no current software supports your design.




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