1 Topic by ruiz.garrison

  • ruiz.garrison
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Topic: FilaWinder Nano's being BRICKED!

FTDI, the manufacturers of the chips for USB coms, released a driver update 2.12.0 that could brick counterfeit FTDI chips. Since I don't keep up with the news, I figured this out first hand the hard way.

I had crossed contacts with the power supply switch and the potentiometer, and essentially fried the AtMega on the nano board. I ordered a replacement nano, got the sketch downloaded, had some issues with sensor calibration so tried the troubleshooting mode. The nano wouldn't connect like normal, had to manually assign the device driver, and the Arduino software kept claiming that the port was in use if I tried to use it. After much time investigating and other troubleshooting steps, I landed on the brick problem. Essentially FTDI recognizes counterfeit chips and rewrites their PID that prevents them from working on any device.

I found a good starting point for reversing the problem here:

reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/2k0i7x/watch_that_windows_update_ftdi_drivers_are/clgviyl

My personal experiences taught me some things though:
    1. You need to get windows to stop installing drivers from the internet, otherwise when you plug in your device for the "first" time windows will continue to download the troublesome driver.
    2. You need to make sure the troublesome driver is deleted from your computer, windows defaults to the most current version on your computer. This can be done by uninstalling the com port assigned to your device, and checking the remove driver option.
    3. There is a second driver as the USB serial converter. make sure this is gone too.
    4. In the end, I'm not really sure there is a need to change any of the files as is implied by the post in my link. It seems to me that the PID can probably be changed without assigning a driver, just as long as there's no way for the troublesome driver to come back and undo the work.

The reason I post all this here is because not only was the replacement nano I purchased bricked for the counterfeit chip, but so was the nano that came with the FilaWinder. If the troublesome driver is installed it seems you get one freebee connection to do stuff, after that there's no changing anything without a bunch of headache. FTDI says that they are going to change that somehow, but I'm venturing a guess that it's still going to cause a lot of problems. Spread the word, prevent headaches by keeping 2.12.0 off your computers.

2 Reply by bobnojio

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Re: FilaWinder Nano's being BRICKED!

... where did you order the replacement Nano from?

because from what Im reading, you broke the official one, bought a sketchy replacement, and the sketchy replacement got bricked due to counterfeit chips.

Did you get the replacement from Here / direct from @elmoret or @IanJohnson or whomever?

3 Reply by ruiz.garrison

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Re: FilaWinder Nano's being BRICKED!

I ordered the replacement off of eBay, and it has to be a knock off. If you look at the silkscreen printing and compare it to a official picture/board you can see differences that make no sense to be, or not be, on an official board (such as version level, and year).
In an effort to reduce costs, the Nanos that came with the Filawinder were purchased from a third party source which might contain counterfeit chips. This was the case with the Nano that came with my Filawinder, both my original Nano and my replacement Nano got bricked. I was able to un-brick both of the Nanos, but because I broke the AtMega chip on the original I cannot use it as is. All that the original can do at this point is connect with the computer.
I might be able to replace the AtMega chip and have a functioning Nano again, but I don't know if there was other damaged components to account for.

4 Reply by vegasloki

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Re: FilaWinder Nano's being BRICKED!

bobnojio wrote:

... where did you order the replacement Nano from?

because from what Im reading, you broke the official one, bought a sketchy replacement, and the sketchy replacement got bricked due to counterfeit chips.

Did you get the replacement from Here / direct from @elmoret or @IanJohnson or whomever?

The board shipped with the kit I got from Elmore a couple week back had a Funduino clone and not a Gravitech Nano.  Gravitech is the creator and manufacturer of the Nano. 

Funduino makes some good clone Arduinos but they may be suseptable the the knock off FTDI due to the supply chain. The smaller vendors can't always be sure it the supply chain is pure and there are tons of knock off FTDI chips in the channel.

5 Reply by insta

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Re: FilaWinder Nano's being BRICKED!

bobnojio wrote:

... where did you order the replacement Nano from?

because from what Im reading, you broke the official one, bought a sketchy replacement, and the sketchy replacement got bricked due to counterfeit chips.

Did you get the replacement from Here / direct from @elmoret or @IanJohnson or whomever?

For what it's worth, the official BOM for the Filawinder calls for a clone Nano.

6 Reply by IanJohnson

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Re: FilaWinder Nano's being BRICKED!

The Gravitech Nanos are something like $34 which just isn't feasible.  I'm considering having my own made which would be more expensive than buying, but still a lot less than the Gravitechs.  I could specify that the FTDI get tested for authenticity, and hopefully the extra cost would be compensated somewhat by reliability.   I test all of the Nanos after programming, and have had failure rates range from 0-15% of the boards in an order.