i’ll stop back and answer anything (sparkfun will not?).
sparkfun is the exclusive maker and distributor of the closed-source teensy and informed us we will not be able to purchase the teensy. this happened after i sent an email reporting the founder, nate, for multiple harassing actions directed at limor, including behavior by him and a former employee.
instead of addressing that, they decided to kill the messenger, me, and also cut us off from teensy.
so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters, we are doing an open-source alternative. so customers are not stranded, and this is not a supply chain emergency for us. looking forward to seeing which one delights customers more.
as much as nate wants to continue trying to damage limor’s business and adafruit by scraping our site, and now potentially not paying royalties owed after more than a decade of consistent payments, that’s nothing new. it’s a business strategy to cut others out, not a mystery or a “private drama.”
this is exactly why we do open source. when a closed product or exclusive channel is used as leverage, the correct response is to remove the leverage.
sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.
If it means anything, the first thought I had reading this post was "I wonder how SparkFun is exaggerating or misrepresenting this situation, because I can't believe Adafruit of all organizations is in the wrong here."
> because I can't believe Adafruit of all organizations is in the wrong here.
I've been hearing about this drama through a group chat for a long time. To be honest, neither side looks good in this one. Both companies have behaved disappointingly at different times for different reasons. I'm not doing this is an arbitrary "both sides" dismissal. There have been actions from both companies that would have been unacceptable in isolation.
The OSHW world revolves a lot around conferences, social media, and IRC/Matrix/Discord servers. Not coincidentally, this feels a lot like old IRC and forum drama of years past.
Both companies are pretty small and presumably exist because their owners are passionate about hobby electronics. Honestly, I'd rather have companies like that ran by (flawed) humans than by PR robots.
If they want to air their dirty laundry in public, I'm happy to grab popcorn and watch. I'm honestly shocked by the number of folks on this thread who don't know the specifics, and most probably never even bought anything from Sparkfun or Adafruit, but still want to condemn one of the companies in the strongest possible terms...
It would be nice if people came out and explained exactly what the harassment, COC violations, etc were so we could make accurate judgements ourselves about all of this. And no, posting literally what happened or what was sent or said will not get you in trouble for libel unless you don't have proof of it happening.
This dancing around what was actually said or sent all reminds me of that meme, Dipshit289: dude you don't wanna know... Oh the horror...
Fwiw, there's this thread that seemingly explains what employee was doing the harassment - and shows Phil overreacting and exaggerating the 'harassment' itself, as well as misattributing blame: https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877
That makes me think much less of both Adafruit and SparkFun. I really, really wish all sides would simply put everything out for us to evaluate. Having to trust various unreliable narrators is not respectful to the time of all of us potential customers.
> sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.
Ok sure, but the explanation provided strikes me as equally vague. I don't think anyone who isn't familiar with this situation has any idea what the hell is going on between these two orgs tbh.
If a dispassionate observer can't figure out situation without significant effort, then it's very easy to handwave this away as unimportant.
Personally I'd very much hate for that to happen here if something truly noteworthy happened.
The problem is once you get into concrete specifics, you enter the realm of legal liability and potential libel, so it's all posturing until their adrenaline runs out, then they'll either reconcile (or not) behind closed doors.
You know, I think you're right. I recant what I said earlier. I actually don't think I should care about this matter at all.
In a more general sense, it seems best to me that people should just mind their own business and settle things like adults without giving into this pervasive and strange desire to be vindicated by their framing of the situation to others.
There is literally no benefit to anyone but the storyteller. They are either seen as more or less virtuous by their framing of the situation.
They have an interest in telling you a story that makes them look good and a greater interest in downplaying their guilt in the matter. At the end of the day it means very little to most observers.
Pair that with the absolute disincentive to provide actual specifics, the whole thing is moot to an honest person.
My take away from this link is not what Adafruit probably wants.
> we told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order
> that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_
You don't tell or demand another company do something with their own employees. There's more professional ways of dealing with a situation like this.
Request a meeting. Send a calm, collected, professional email to a decision-maker and be sure it's well sourced and factual. Keep things in private.
If the other party decides not to take action, then make a decision if you want to continue doing business with them. Do not keep pressuring them for the outcome you want, do not escalate the situation, and certainly don't drag the dirty laundry out into the public.
Like, what good did Adafruit actually think was going to come from getting into a fight with the founder of Sparkfun? 50 lashings with a wet noodle?
Whatever Sparkfun allegedly did to cause this, Adafruit looks pretty poor in this light. I've been a long time customer of both Adafruit and Sparkfun, and will continue to be - but this is some rookie, amateur, hot-headed behavior from Adafruit.
> You don't tell or demand another company do something with their own employees.
Depends what they did. Let's check the forum post…
> they had created and promoted hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment targeting limor, me, and others at adafruit. this was done on company time, shared, promoted.
Ok yeah if a company is sharing bigoted photoshops of my likeness, yes, I'm gonna demand that they discipline the responsible employees. Obviously.
I don't have any reference point for what "hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment [meriting HR training]" constitute, but if it's anywhere near as bad as it sounds, sure, escalate the situation and air your dirty laundry in public. This is unacceptable behaviour, and apparently it went on for years. When you're being publicly harassed, you have no duty to indefinitely restrain your response to private, polite emails.
It sounds like the allegations are for things that was be illegal in nature.
I think the expected way to handle something like this would be to write the calm factual email. If that goes nowhere then sue them. I don't think the public airing approach is the right one.
Suing is way more expensive and way more hostile than simply airing your grievances in public. And why not? That's what public forums are for. "Do nothing" and "sue them" are not your only options; we are part of a society, not merely party to a legal system.
It’s difficult to prosecute online harassment, and “hate sites and photoshopped images” aren’t illegal. There’s a right to freedom of speech in the US.
They seem to have reported it in private and were then banned and publicly accused of Code of Conduct violations in retaliation. Going public with everything would seem to be the reasonable response.
Sure, but they did so by going to the Teensy forum, which is not a SparkFun site, and really made a stink. If going public is reasonable, they did it in the least reasonable way.
That’s not what I’m seeing.
They requested comments from the public about the product, only mentioning that the fact that they weren’t allowed to purchase more from Sparkfun [0]. Sparkfun then jumped into the discussion with accusations of a Code of Conduct violation, and only then did they respond publicly. Sparkfun made it public first in that 3rd party forum.
after a decade of dealing with the founder's bullying, i had enough, looking back almost every year there was something. we did handle things privately until it was clear nothing was going to change, the only real change is we cannot buy teensy, a closed source board sparkfun exclusively makes now, maybe they (sparkfun) will stop paying the payments on something that had to agreed to, and have, we'll see.
I understand you're pretty upset with the situation, and I can't blame you.
But I never should be reading about any of this on public forums. It doesn't reflect well on you or Adafruit.
Now an outcome has been chosen for you, without your input. The situation is probably irreconcilable.
That's not the position you ever want to be in. Obviously.
If the situation was untenable, after your reasonable and private attempts, you should have decided to sever ties on your terms. The outcome would have been the same, but you'd be in control of the situation, and wouldn't be permanently leaving things in public view.
I'm sorry for the situation. I'm a real hot head at times, but it's something I've learned (the hard way, over and over again) that I need to control. Business is business...
> Now an outcome has been chosen for you, without your input. The situation is probably irreconcilable.
I think you've reversed cause and effect. SparkFun publicly cut off Adafruit in response to Adafruit's private contact with SparkFun. Only then did Adafruit put out a public post addressing SparkFun's vague public allegations.
there was only one product we were purchasing anything in the hundreds of units, the teensy... we had a record sales today, inquires for a new board that is open source, so i think the community and customers have made decisions too.
The Teensy is so 2020 anyways. You want to skate where the puck is going.
You will want boards of the Kendryte K230 or SpacemitK3 (best value RISC-V chips) or Puya PY32 (best cheapest MCU, takes 5V!), and a STM32P1 linux board for good measure.
You must be misunderstanding: the public post you are linking is from the party you are not talking to, and was the first publicly published thing, which if I'm reading correctly, is the sin to you.
I completely disagree. Be yourself. And broadly, if you aspire to be in charge, as opposed to a forever IC, be yourself even more!
Adafruit makes an aesthetic experience that appeals to a niche audience. It is not an hockey stick growth company. And even those that are: Everybody makes aesthetic experiences. Nobody needs hobbyist microcontrollers.
Part of the product is being on the “right side” of Internet dramas.
If part of the product is "being on the right side of Internet drama", that kinda makes me trust them even less. A perverse incentive to get involved in stupid slapfights, escalate, and lie about it...
I don't mean to be rude but given that I've seen several public statements about this "situation" from Paul dating back to Nov, I think you're commenting on a less complete dataset than I am.
I see: when you’re working with another company and someone’s a dick, you can’t mention it and give constructive suggestions on how to fix it, because then the suggestions are transmutated into an order. That means you are telling a company what it has to do to stop the bad thing, which is worse than the bad thing.
> it has to do to stop the bad thing, which is worse than the bad thing
Imo that “worse than the bad thing” evaluation is highly subjective. Nevertheless, I have to say I agree with the poster who recommends you cut ties on your own terms.
The fact that the Adafruit team continued that thread unabashedly after Paul Stoffregen's first reply is an awful look in my opinion. Doesn't seem like anyone here is behaving like adults.
Edit: I should clarify - Paul seems very much like a mature adult in all of this.
Wow, and it gets worse from there. I think Paul is smart to let Phil drag him on his own forum rather than let him go blow up on social media for getting banned.
My first thought was the same. I used to like Sparkfun but then they closed the source of some of their projects (while often "forgetting" to update their website to reflect that). I was concerned when I saw the headline but just assumed that Sparkfun was probably in the wrong even before I saw the comments.
Yeah just to add to this pile, I've always found Adafruit to be one of the most reasonable companies in the space. I've been buying their products for a decade.
Same. I was afraid that there was some bad egg that managed to get into Adafruit, or maybe someone was having a real bad day. You never know what kind of person someone is off camera, but Adafruit as a company has always managed to give off the most wholesome vibes.
I'll be interested to see how this unfolds. I have little skin in the game being mostly upstream of the supply chain, but I've had reason to purchase from both companies, and hope this doesn't blow up into a huge thing.
That was my first thought as well, especially given the accusation of code of conduct violation. Not that I think that Adafruit is perfect no matter what, but I would have been shocked if this turned out to be true as stated.
Why is your "open source Teensy" [0] just an RP2350 on a Teensy shaped board?
In my book, what makes a Teensy a Teensy is 1) hardware support, like 600Mhz clock, CAN, FPU, RTC, other hardware peripherals which the RP2350 lacks and 2) software compatibility with Paul Stoffregen's well documented Teensyduino libraries. I would not buy something else if I needed these features.
Do you plan to do a port? Why not build around the same IMXRT1062? Are you barred from buying Paul's bootloader chips [1]?
hi, great question. we have to start with something and while the RP2350 is not going to beat a 600mhz m7 it is much less expensive, fast to get, has lots of nifty support libraries available, and will definitely do better than the teensy 3.2 which many folks loved so much (and was discontinued during the chip shortage). this is also a great time to add things that we always wanted in the teensy: SWD debug, built in 8 MB storage, lipoly battery charging, open source bootloader, open hardware design. stuff like CAN is supported via PIO (https://github.com/KevinOConnor/can2040), as is USB host on any two adjacent pins. M33 has FPU, and the dormant/RTC mode for the RP2350 is 10uA (see https://www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-pico/...). other 'teensiriffic' things like NeoPixel DMA support is well supported by PIO on the RP2350. as well as I2S audio.
as for the bootloader chip: we don't want to trade one closed-single-source component for another. if we're going to make something it should be fully open source as much as we can!
finally, for teensyduino libraries that you love: there's no reason they cant be ported (we did an audio port for the samd51) - which specific library are you referring to?
Thanks for the answer. I know many are scared off by the closed bootloader of the teensy (though I feel it's a fair thing to do). The lack of on-chip debugging is another shortcoming the Teensys have.
I've been working on an audio project recently, and the the ease of use and feature set that TeensyAudio has is incredible.
Teensy 4 does currently fill a pretty unique niche in terms of processing power though. There isn't much like it outside of professional eval boards.
It supports the developer by preventing blatant ripoffs of the Teensy.
Paul is one guy, and has put in a ton of effort writing high quality libraries for it. Most or all of them are open source. The main MCU is a commodity item. Only the bootloader chip is closed source.
If you want to rip off the Teensy, you can use the same MCU but you'll need to come up with your own bootloading process (Adafruit could do this if they wanted to). It wouldn't be that difficult but is enough of a barrier to stop casual cloning. Seeing as how Amazon and Aliexpress are filled with cheap Arduino clones but not Teensys, it seems to have gone well so far. Nobody wants to be undercut so easily by someone who has no intention of contributing back.
Supporting free and open source technology means supporting whoever can get it in as many hands as possible as cheaply as possible while paying your employees fairly. Adafruit gets this.
Making anything proprietary at this point for use in DIY software or hardware projects just makes me roll my eyes and hold my money for the day the open clones come. I have been saddened by dead open hardware projects because old versions of Teensy they were built around are no longer produced.
I will never buy a Teensy, but I look forward to buying the Freensy.
Sparkfun blew it by making the Teensy partially closed and so Teensy will be irrelevant. LibreOffice, OpenTofu, MariaDB etc. The most open solution always wins in the end. It is why I buy Prusa over Bambu, and why I pick Adafruit over Sparkfun.
My own companies likewise freely OSI license everything we do to the public no matter what the profit minded folks in our universe have to say. I -love- when people compete with us using our own work. If you can make a budget version of what we invent for people that cannot afford a bit extra to support us, wonderful. That is success for us as a creators that want to maximize impact.
If you cannot afford our prices, by all means buy from a competitor and contribute to the ecosystem that our customers benefit from anyway. That is why we will never spend a second of our engineering time creating or promoting proprietary technology because all the skills we have are because others shared their work with us.
I honestly take a lot of inspiration from companies like Adafruit as a leader of my own orgs.
> Teensy 4 does currently fill a pretty unique niche in terms of processing power though. There isn't much like it outside of professional eval boards.
If I want that much performance, maybe I should think about a Pocketbeagle 2. And almost every embedded MCU these days is sprouting an on-chip "AI" extension ;).
Right, but you're not really competing on processor speed. You're competing on maturity of peripherals where the RP doesn't really match up PIO or not.
Edit: I see you're comparing it to the 3.2 but I suspect most folks are going to be comparing your offering to the 4.x.
Yeah - I don't really consider this comparable for my uses which rely heavily on the DSP and processing power of the Teensy itself either.
Drama and whatnot aside I'm not really sure why anyone would buy the (considerably more expensive) Teensy over something RP based if RP was suitable for their needs already.
Interestingly despite being a Teensy fan I have found myself reaching more towards the RP when I can because I can't stand the Arduino API and much prefer the RP SDK. I do use Teensy without Teensyduino (Makefile based) and also a bit of the CMSIS-DSP stuff directly - but it's kinda clunky IMO.
I've been interested to hear more about use cases for these "hybrid" MCUs, can you share a bit about why you chose that over something like a Cortex-A running linux, or an SoC with -A and -M cores?
It's a good question - unfortunately I don't really have a good answer...
Almost all of my embedded activities are for a my own hobby purposes, and I just like the ability to go 'as low as I can' with projects on MCUs. It's nice to be able to use the device's peripherals as much as possible (hardware DSP etc) and I'm not confident in how I'd do that on a Linux based system. I'm in to building my own ham radio Software Defined receivers and it's nice to keep it completely real time.
If I were to be doing this stuff professionally (and I am very close to people who do at work) then yeah I'd probably be using Zephyr or something.
Ah interesting! I work on (very expensive) SDRs and we make pretty heavy use of Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale SoCs. They combine Cortex-A, Cortex-R, and FPGA fabric all in one package, with some fancy interconnects. So you can handle the hard realtime stuff on an RTOS or in the FPGA, then send the data over to the application processor with a hard float ALU to crunch some numbers (or build some kind of dsp IP into the FPGA, idk much about that side of it).
I've also seen some cool stuff with the BeagleBone products, which have a few TI custom architecture DSPs and "realtime units" which you can communicate with via Linux.
But yeah, I can certainly see how just doing it all on a super fast MCU could be easier and cheaper without the backing of commercial enterprises.
I've always thought it would be cool to design a "poor man's zynq" hat for a SBC. Stick a RP3050 and a Lattice FPGA on there and set up some SPI / UART connections.
it will have benefits over the 4.x - we can always spin up a version with the iMX chipset (we have a metro board with the little sister chip, iMX RT1011 already in stock) - tbh if we did something with the iMX RT106x we'd probably start with a Metro (Arduino-shield compatible) or Feather board since that's a super-popular pinout.
either way, more hardware is better and we don't want to just give people the same-old-same-old... as we mentioned there's lots of things that we can add to make the board useful to people: SWD, USB C, Lipoly batt, onboard storage, neopixel LED, etc). what peripheral/library are you specifically concerned about?
Mostly I'm just leery of software defined peripherals being at the mercy of whatever community springs up around them, nothing specific. In terms of a Metro then yeah, something to slot in where the Due was absolutely with high speed USB, 10/100 ethernet, CAN FD, and all that jazz that wouldn't work on a $10 board. A SAMV70 successor to the Due?
NXP just seems antithetical to an open platform. Then again Arduino went with Renesas, and they're… not great.
Otherwise it's the openness that would pique my interest. SWD headers, yes 100%. But also the documentation. No half-assed SVDs, buggy closed source flash algorithms (Microchip), wholly undocumented peripherals (looking at you Renesas), stuff like that.
All chip manufacturers are alike in this respect, unfortunately. That whole industry believes that they thrive on secrecy and that simply properly speccing their hardware would already be a massive competitive risk.
Nah, it's a spectrum. Companies like NXP and Infineon are at one end. NXP wants a ton of personal information to access even the most basic docs on some of its chips, sometimes even an NDA. Infineon won't even acknowledge you for the most part.
Companies like STM, RP, and TI are at the other end. STM got super popular because they're cheap and the documentation is incredibly easy to get at. I think RP is following suit.
Renesas puts out some documentation, but it's really rough. Anything that has even a whiff of crypto is completely undocumented. They're also squatting on a few Rust crates where Espressif actually hired a Rust developer to work on their Rust HAL. The most comical thing is that while they version their reference manual they don't seem to update it and instead issue a ton of broad errata that apply to multiple manuals.
Before the acquisition Atmel's documentation was well written and organized.
Agreed. I will say that Renesas does have one thing going for them, being Japanese it has the lowest supply chain/geopolitical risk right now of anybody other than TI.
And the Microchip/Atmel low end stuff is so overpriced/outdated, that you're be better off stockpiling reels of the 8 cent Puya chips or going with the the TI MSPM0.
That's fair. Even so, the majority of the companies whose chips I would consider for specialized electronics seem to be so far down on the paranoid spectrum that it hinders their business.
Sure, some do, but some are coming around and some were never there. Which is why it's important for a company like Adafruit to pick a manufacturer that is towards the open end of the spectrum. Unfortunately NXP isn't that manufacturer even if their silicon is more powerful.
If you replace the Teensy 4.x it would have to be something very close to the same pinout, foot print, cost and features otherwise it would just be a new product. Ideally you would find a way to source the Teensy directly bypassing Sparkfun.
Yes, obviously, but they don't make the chips, so can't you just source the exact same chip, make thing pin compatible and call it a day? Then you'd have a drop in replacement, any changes you make will cause disruption for people downstream.
I have projects that can equally use either a Teensy or a few different Feather boards, and frankly the Feather boards are always the prefferred option beacause:
* assymetrical footprint - the assymmetrical dip footprint means the board has polarity protection. I have hat/receiver boards with zig-zag stagger dip rows that work as free componentless sockets to receive a feather board with pins soldered. The Feather versions are far more convenient and safe since they can't be plugged in any way but the correct way.
* The Feather standard being a standard - ecosystem of compatible boards with compatible footprint & pinout at least for main functions.
* lipo charging circuit and jst plug, the automatic ups functionality, usb charging, removable/replaceable via standard plug
* off-board power on/off - I very much make use of the trick Feather has where a hat can turn the mcu board on/off without being the source of power to the mcu board.
* Perhaps a small detail but Feathers with sd card slots have the card sense pin wired up to a gpio pin while the teensy's do not. On Feather I can have a hardware interrupt fire when a card is inserted or ejected, and I can't do that on Teensy.
* keeping all parts on the top surface - there are other mcu dev boards with some similar functions but they are less convenient to use as a module in a project since they may have buttons, jst plug, sd card slot, or other stuff on both sides of the board, which makes them inaccessible when mounted onto some other pcb.
Teensy has a few points in their favor too but I really value these facets of most Feather boards.
I think this is a bit tone-deaf the reason why the teensy is so desirable is because of its raw power in such a neat package. The RP2350 is great but if I wanted that I would just purchase it rather than the Freensy
I for one abandoned the Teensy for all projects once I realized it was closed as I have no interest in promoting or teaching closed hardware and software in my personal DIY time.
I will gladly be a customer of your open hardware replacements.
> hardware support, like 600Mhz clock, CAN, FPU, RTC, other hardware peripherals which the RP2350 lacks
FWIW, those are all NXP-provided features on the chip, not something Sparkfun has any particular connection with. There are other iMX devices on the market, just not in this form factor. And there are other vendors with SoCs offering similar performance.
Really one of the biggest problems in this market is that everyone is putting the abstractions in the wrong place. We've all collectively decided that this stuff is scary and we need comforting IDEs and hardware uniformity to deal with it.
But... portable software and frameworks are hardly new ideas. Come over to Zephyr and see all the stuff you can run on boards from basically everyone, including NXP.
There's a lot more great hardware for your project than just Teensy, so stop locking yourself in.
Oh boy, just what we need. Drama between open hardware vendors. Neither of these responses feels like the complete story to me. I hope there's a path forward to heal this rift in one way or another. Both SparkFun and Adafruit are doing amazing things for the community and I would love to see both continue to thrive.
There was conflict between the new (old) hardware manufacturer Core Devices, and the Rebble community that's maintained the app store and software for the original Pebbles. I think they've worked it out, but it got ugly for a bit.
Do you have a response/explanation for the two specific accusations about forwarding inappropriate emails to sparkfun employees, and involving a customer with something?
Those seem extremely vague, but I didn't see them mentioned in the blog post.
It would be deeply funny if SparkFun was referring to Adafruit forwarding inappropriate emails written by SparkFun employees to SparkFun, in an attempt to report their harassment.
That is exactly how I understand it at the moment. And depending on the material, it would be a somewhat valid complaint, if the report included the material without prior warning. Though, not valid enough to call CoC on this, IMHO.
It would only be at all valid if it was forwarded to employees who weren’t in a customer facing role.
Saying that you’re required to give a content warning to an account manager for material related to your business relationship puts the burden of responsibility onto the victim. Dealing with the psychological impact is the responsibility of their employer, not the customer.
No, even in a customer-facing role, you won't have to put up with every s**. I mean, it's a business for electronics, not a porn-shop or moderation for explicit material at some social media-platform. There should be a line on what they have to tolerate.
From the little we know the "material" in question would be photoshops made to harass Limor, made by someone at sparkfun. So it would be weird for sparkfun to complain , given the content originated with one of their employees. (Allegedly)
>so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters..
one corporate side overshares by pointing fingers and accusing a different corporation...
so that corporation decides to be the better person, declare the opponent as weirdos, then proceed to point fingers at individuals instead for collective action from the public.
This is the big deal. Don't think of it as petty. From nations to individuals, betrayal destroys built trust and changes the landscape. Even Kissinger admits that Trust can maintain an anarchic/international order until the trust is broken.
This is why I'm am a realist, power is more important than Trust, and when you need Trust, use verification mechanisms. This idea is technically an 'Information Hazard' because it causes arms races and costs everyone more resources.
Uh, I'm saying these people are acting with the emotional maturity of children.
You might be right that it seems like world politics but only in the way that world politics are very often driven by people with the emotional development, ego, and maturity of 12 year olds.
I laughed way too hard at this. Also, I can't even read some of these statements with a straight face because all the project and company names sound completely ridiculous when placed in serious sentences, it's like reading about embezzlement charges for Sesame Street characters.
Hah, really? He's a treasure, met him a few times at poetry readings and such. A quick search isn't bringing anything up but google has been failing me a lot lately. Or I'm failing at google a lot lately.
Adafruit is maybe an all time amazing success story built on giving more of a shit than anyone else. There is a direct through line from reading MAKE in high school through programming the 8 LED POV thing through the rest of my career. Limor doesn't answer a forum question on a Sunday morning in like 2008 and I don't make my mortgage payment this month and my son gets store brand formula. I wish you every success professionally and in this new chapter with your tiny miracle, and I hope for an amicable resolution to this whole Sparkfun thing.
Weird that your STT doesn't handle capitals, but that's a good excuse. Sounds like you're having a challenging day, I hope my snarky joke wasn't too annoying.
As someone who hung out on IRC way back in the 1990s (and internet-knew Limor from Adafruit back before her handle was Ladyada) I associate this writing style with the culture of a lot of the hacker-related IRC channels I used to hang out in back then.
Some of the same people from that era did in fact turn out to be tech founders and maybe that's how it got carried over into the Twitter-verse, but it predates that.
Corroborating. It goes way back to the early 90s IRC and MUD cultures, from which many of us sprung. Limor came to the scene a bit later, but the culture was well-established.
Most of us would code shift when writing in other milieux, some weaned ourselves off the habit when our work started interfacing with nonreceptive readers, and a few retained the affectation to make a statement (or an anti-statement!).
It's amusing to see the style resurface in a new generation though. I guess it's no more odd than when 20 year olds unknowingly emulate the dress and mannerisms from when their parents were young. We just smile and recall the age when we thought we were being different too. :)
Not much later, I remember her hanging out in #hack in the '92-93 timeframe (first as lem0n then later as ladyada).
She was like the "kid" of the channel regulars (which is an extremely relative designation because there were a lot of teenagers just a couple years older than her).
I also remember her going to one of the 2600 meetings at the CambridgeSide Galleria that I went to with morgen and wil wheaton that must have been either in 1993 or very early 1994 (it was definitely prior to the first HOPE in 94). IIRC Limor was being chaperoned by RogueAgent and theora/Sarah Gordon.
Sounds right. I was only an occasional attendee at the Galleria, but the timeline makes sense.
H.O.P.E. brings back memories though -- I was very uncertain that that Poland Springs jug would contain the explosives taped to the Clipper chip. I remember wishing I was sitting several rows further back for that moment. :)
It goes back before that. There were well known Usenet folks who adhered to the style. The 1970s-and-earlier Arpanet was before my time, but I'm sure it existed then too ;).
You know, I was trying to remember if anyone from Usenet did similarly, but I couldn't think of anyone.
I was a bit post-Great Renaming into well post-Eternal September. And we may have followed different groups.
The style arises spontaneously in isolated individuals and groups of course (at least since e. e. cummings!), but it was pervasive-to-universal on IRC and MUDs.
I do wonder how it trickled into there though. The most boring answer is probably the correct one. it was slightly easier to type and kids are naturally flexible.
Your other posts have capital letters for technical abbreviations and "Sparkfun", but not for "I" and the first letter of sentences.
Sorry, from a bystander this looks like a straight-up lie, and why lie about such a small thing? It brings into question the truth of your other statements. Just say you like the style if that's the truth.
some are already words/abbreivations that are in my word list and some are me typing over later when i can, and some is a cut/paste if limor has something for me to add or does an edit as she looks at things. you can see my writings on the adafruit blog have caps, commenting on forums or hackersnews quickly, there will be some things someone does not like. we were at the doc with our 2 month old during this ... https://x.com/ptorrone/status/2011509017814659095
Let me inform you (and anyone else for that matter) that one observer has observed 2 samples of writing today, yours and his, and has formed 2 impressions of the writers, and that yours is not the more favorable. Do with this information what you will.
It is clearly a deliberate choice to send the signal of conforming to a particular type of non-conformance. It’s a costly signal because most people will see it as having the emotional maturity of a child, it signals to others that given their social status they can afford that self imposed handicap.
years and years and years of ptorrone's posts aren't capitalized, though. it's not like they suddenly decided today, for the purposes of this post, to change their writing style.
in any case, i prefer to decide whether someone has the "emotional maturity of a child" based on what they say, not whether they push their shift key.
I heard that altman does it. I don't care about him enough to check though. More silly gimmicks like holmes talking in a mans voice or jobs wearing the same turtle neck
How it's perceived is no doubt in the eye of the beholder. I can totally see how some people would associate this writing style with children, and so associate it with "vulnerable".
I have no idea what any of this thread is about, but I'm sure the thing that I'm going to remember next time I need to buy something from one of these two is that one of them can be bothered to use capital letters, so I'll use them.
This whole thread is utterly ridiculous. I can't take anyone seriously who is sitting here saying they can't take someone else seriously over this, or even saying anything at all about it as though it were the tiniest bit significant.
It's like Vance on Zelensky's clothes. Exhibiting high ignorance and triviality while in the very act of presuming to accuse someone else of being unserious.
@ptorrone, the forum drama is hard to follow, and maybe a little upset or sleep-deprived.
The blog post is OK (though maybe consider dropping the "We were informed...", and the addendum about "trying to drag"), but doesn't explain the forum drama about context.
In a skim of the forum, I saw only insufficient references to a context of problems and maybe improper behavior, scattered around. I couldn't get a good read on the context, after trying for longer than I think most people will.
If the company would like to explain more about the context, would it make sense to take a deep breath, and sit down with a PR advisor or lawyer, to figure out exactly what you want to say, and how? Do it very carefully, so you only have to do it once?
Or would the company like to drop the matter of that context, and move on, even though that would leave the confusing forum messages?
(Disclosure: Limor is a friend from our earlier hacker/MIT days, but I've not discussed this matter with her.)
I am a lifelong Sparkfun and Adafruit customer, I grew up and went to engineering school just down the street from Sparkfun.
This event will cause me to no longer be a Sparkfun customer.
There is no one that I have more respect for in this world than limor. She has done more for this industry, education and open source than anyone alive.
Appreciate the transparency! The one thing that doesn't quite add up for me is SparkFun accusing you of "involving a SparkFun customer" in the dispute. Can you comment on what that might be referring to?
probably mentioning on PJRC's forum they're making their own teensy compatible because sparkfun(Under contract by PJRC as the exclusive teensy manufacturer) cut them off.
> We are now working on an open-source, Teensy-compatible board.
Yeah, right; the PCB art work looks in rather an advanced state of completion that has been in the works for a while due to the proverbial writing being on the wall.
More like, we have now given a brighter green light to our ongoing in-house project to eliminate the supply risk coming from Sparkfun, now that the shit has hit the fan ...
What’s the deal with 5v, 3.3v and 24v “standards” for sensors? It seems like there are really three different markets and it sucks because crossing “lanes” is really annoying. I like how you all made the qwik connectors “just work”, but now that I’m trying more industrial stuff I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get my 24v world to play nicely with the 3.3v world but of course my 24v world only wants to do SPI over 5v.
Anyhoo, sorry we can’t just stick to the technical drama.
Those levels are based on the electronics themselves. Earlier circuits used TTL which needed higher voltages to signify a "High". Newer CMOS based electronics need less voltage.
Lower voltages help with power savings. Higher voltages can and do work better in high power, high noise environments though! 24V as you see is still very popular and useful inany applications.
> What’s the deal with 5v, 3.3v and 24v “standards” for sensors?
Historical garbage and different manufacturing technologies. Be happy if you can get away with only 5V and 3V3 rails in your project. 24V is usually to interface with industrial sensors. And sometimes you see 12V as well, for stuff that's RS232 based.
And on top of that you got a fifth standard, 4..20 mA current loops. That one is used for long range transmission of analog values of a single sensor per wire pair, with 4-20 mA being seen as the value (4 mA = 0%, 20 mA = 100%), and anything less being seen as a cable break, anything higher as a short circuit somewhere.
4 to 20mA signaling is only the start of a very specific rabbit hole. Someone had the brilliant idea to encode digital signals on top of the analog current loop. The result is the HART communication protocol, which is old, bloated, confusing, quirky - and it is really popular in industrial automation.
Those voltage standards are kind of meant for very local things. If you really get into industrial things, one should look to industrial standards that work over longer distances. That is things like RS422, RS485, and increasingly industrial versions of ethernet that use differential signals. One should also learn what a PLC is and understand that in an industrial context, implementing controls in an Arduino or rpi is probably reinventing the wheel to achieve less reliability than industry standards.
4 to 20mA sensors are great. Invented in the 50s (!) to replace pneumatic controls and to this day work great. iirc they are usually 24V these days. You missed an important detail; the first 4mA (96mW) powers the sensor/local microcontroller (no local power supply required), and the remaining 4-20mA gives a calibrated current output for voltage/pressure/whatever you are measuring. If the output is less than 4mA or more than 20mA you know something is wrong (and many devices will output 20.1, 20.2 etc currents as a kind of fault code).
Never used 2-10V but I learned about 0-10V when someone approached me to design a device to input 0-10V position signal and output two phase-shifted sinusoids to retrofit to a controller that only took resolver inputs. We shipped a couple dozen of them to repair broken machine tools. Fun project, but not going to get rich from it!
I'm guessing that the 2-10V is to detect line break conditions?
At least going between 3.3 and 5 Volts, they depend on the fab process used to make the chip. Fab capacity is more widely available for the lower voltages, making it inconvenient to keep supplying higher voltage chips. It has also gotten easier to do high performance analog at lower voltages.
Yeah, it's a pain. Many of my boards have both 3.3 and 5 Volt rails. There are quite a number of level-shifting logic buffers, for instance that are powered by 3.3 but accept 5-V inputs with no penalty.
For hobbyist type stuff, a 3.3 V CMOS chip will accept a 5 V logic signal if you feed it through a series resistor, since the built-in protection diodes of the CMOS chip will clamp the voltage. Don't let the engineers catch you doing it. ;-) But I often use a series resistor to provide a little bit of overload protection to a CMOS input.
Little or no logic ever operated at 24 V, other than relays. There's always some level translation needed there. The higher voltage follows the same rule as electric transmission lines: Correspondingly lower current allows for thinner wire, of importance if you're driving something like a solenoid valve.
So back in the day ducks under thrown bottles and tomatoes we had the standard 4000 series on 3V-18V and life was grand. The CMOS chips, less grand.
Then we had the 7400 series around then too, and boy howdy did that product line proliferate. The BJT TTL families got in so many things, but it demanded Vcc of 5V +-5% and I think it is safe to say anything expected to work with those chips standardized on 5V. Great, everyone is agre— ah.
74C is a CMOS line that happily uses 3V-15V. Ok, we can ignore that one it's just a... Nevermind, 74HC and friends do 2V-6V, neat. But it still works with the 5V so we're great.
So, CMOS got better, we got gates down to 3V or less with competitive propagation timing, and it turns out that less power use is good for clocking, but we can't actually feed anything 3V because of voltage drop so it's 10% higher cause... someone figured that was a nice round number or something?
As for why it keeps dropping... Thinner conductor channels, thinner insulation, you do the math. Yes, power consumption with more gates is a reason too, but I'm pinning the biggest blame badge on decreasing sizes in the process nodes.
Oh, you know all that already and want to know about just the sensor/interconnect split? My bad. Line drop, afaik. 3.3V signalling is fine on a PCB or when your wires are short. Want to move your sensors further away? Maybe 5V will be a tad more reliable. That sensor over 20m away? Sure, 24V sounds appealing. I don't know the exact lengths where voltage drop on the wiring is enough to cause issues but I'm pretty sure that kind of reasoning in why it persists beyond simple logic compatibility.
As a secondary concern of the same form, non-differential protocols are voltages you have knowledge and control of, the various kinds of line noise less so. A data line offset by a volt is more problematic at 3.3V than 24V
Oh and if I'm driving a small industrial motor or actuator, or a 400V rated relay, I definitely want to be doing so with more enthusiasm than 5V signifies. I also want less enthusiasm than electrocution cause I touched a logic line. 24V will (just about) generally not give you a meaningful shock unless you try to lick it.
great question! so historically microcontrollers (and sensors) were 5V 'CMOS' power and logic. this was way better than the up-to-12V for TTL logic but over time the desire for higher clock speeds / faster IO / lower power means the voltage needs to drop (since power = current * voltage lower voltage is lower power) the next voltage standard became 3.3V. these days, even 3.3V is a 'bit high' and we're seeing lots of device that are 1.8V or 1.65V or even 1.2V max (yeek!) one thing we do for all of our sensor breakouts is add level shifting up/down as necessary so they work with EITHER 5V older boards (yay no need to throw them out!) or with the newer 3.3V boards (woo forward compatibility) level shifting and regulation also reduces the risk of damage from over/under volting or plugging stuff in backwards. this is documented here: https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-adafruit-stemma-qt/st...
maybe someone from sparkfun could post advice for you here too...
Ooh thank you! I often forget that everything is a capacitor/resistor/inductor all at once and i see how at higher frequencies that starts to matter! I think the 24v stuff is also more low frequency signaling over longer distances so rise/fall time is less of a worry but voltage drop / noise is perhaps more of one. Thanks!
Fwiw, I’m team adafruit on this. Hope it works out for y’all
That's normally good advice, but this is a small enough niche that trust-in-brand matters a great deal. Right now AdaFruit is looking like the villain here. I think a little more transparency from them is a very good thing if they don't want to suffer massive brand damage.
Definitely avoid ad hominems, and focus purely on facts. Provide what information/evidence you can without violating agreements, but only if it's relevant to the situation and includes as much context as possible.
No in this case addressing the accusation is necessary.
I think what's currently been said is sufficient. You need to make a grown up version of the statement "None of that is true", but yes probably best to leave it at that.
Honestly, this being Adafruit, my default assumption is to believe them. Especially with this super vague "please read between the lines because if I actually say something false it'll be libel" accusation.
I find it weird to jump to this from the scarce information we have.
"Someone did a CoC violation" is just a way for an org to say "someone was an asshole to such an extent it was driving other people away or getting us into legal trouble", with the manner of assholery defined in the CoC.
9/10 times it is nothing sinister.
Of course right now we just don't know what happened.
The one thing I know is that for threads such as this one it is best to ignore all of the stuff from accounts made just for the purpose of participating in the thread.
In this case, given the topic of this thread is targeted harassment in response to public social media criticism, I think it's understandable that some folks might like to participate anonymously to avoid becoming a future target.
Nonsense, if you feel strongly about the subject comment in your main account. Otherwise this is just taken as "oh the guys are arguing through side accounts now".
Also this is not some russian mafia drug deal gone wrong, it's nerds disagreeing on the internet.
> "Someone did a CoC violation" is just a way for an org to say "someone was an asshole [...]"
Not even that, since so many CoCs are vague enough that someone unprincipled wielding them could be using them for petty interpersonal disputes. Unless I already have reason to trust the accuser, when I see "CoC violation" it tells me there's drama but it doesn't tell me who the asshole is.
Overall I think Code of Conducts are a net negative. Alleged violations of them seem to be used to lend credibility to actions that otherwise would be hard(er) to justify.
Communities were doing just fine without a CoC up until they became a trend. People got banned too but the moderators couldn't hide behind a CoC to justify questionable decisions.
Communities were not doing fine. CoC didn't come out of nowhere because someone was bored. Having a CoC doesn't absolve moderators any more than having laws absolves judges from having to make good rulings.
I've been part of a lot of communities and never have I felt that a CoC was missing or needed. CoCs didn't come because they were needed but because of a social justice fad. Have a look at the Tim Peters incident with the Python community. The decision to suspend him, a core maintainer (he wrote the Zen of Python), was justified by made-up absurd alleged CoC violations. Without a CoC they couldn't have suspended him as easily without totally losing their face.
A community has to have a set of rules which most people agree on. One of the most common attacks in a moderated forum is "Oh but X did Y" and "thats not fair X can do it"
A CoC can be a simple way to "tap the sign" when someone is being a dick.
It also allows communities to set expectations at the start, not after someone has transgressed and pissed in the well.
In an ideal world, you'd just have a thing that says "don't be a dick" but that doesn't work for many and hilarious reasons. Engineers who who either have a god complex, parsing issues or empathy gaps (either learnt or inherent ) are notoriously difficult as a community to keep from getting into frothy arguments that colour everything and give off a bad smell.
I perceive "guidelines" or "rules" having a very different connotation compared to a "code of conduct."
See for, example, the SQLite team adopting the Rule of St. Benedict as their "Code of Conduct," getting criticized for it, and changing it to a "Code of Ethics" in accordance with the Rule about seeking accommodation with your adversaries.
Note also that Hipp pretty much just let any criticism for that wash over him and, from all public appearances, stayed cool and just kept working on his stuff while the loudmouths got bored and found other people to bother.
Yes but it was always this way. Any organisation with rules can suffer from rules lawyers as a lot of people who have tried to contribute to wilipedia/serve on a committee of a voluntary organisation etc will testify.
I would say incorrect. All that is true is that something is needed, but there is nothing about the problem that requires that particular poor framework for dealing with it.
It just dawned on me that CoC docs are basically HR for open source. Point to a violation and voila, that person is gone. “Sorry, nothing personal, CoC violation, there’s nothing I can do”.
Exactly. Without a CoC the persons making hard decisions have to stand behind them. With a CoC they can hide behind the CoC and wash their hands in innocence. This lowers the barrier for making questionable decisions and overall decreases honesty. We've seen this with the suspension of Python core maintainer Tim Peters.
Wow, I somehow missed all that. That's horrendous. I've always felt that a code of conduct is a tool for bureaucrats to hide behind, and episode doesn't alter my view. Thanks for sharing.
There are bad CoCs and ways to abuse them and people who do. That doesn't mean the concept of setting social expectations for a collaborative project is inherently bad. Same as for discussion forum guidelines and moderation.
No CoC is better than a bad CoC or one where interpretation is centralized to someone with an agenda. But many times a decent CoC can help newcomers in reading the room and support well-intended moderators in making judgement calls.
I also think good CoCs are small and mostly reactive. It's premature social engineering to spend energy on formulating general policies for things that happened once or twice if ever for the project.
Like, maybe wait until you actually had a couple of slop PRs before spending time, energy, and political capital on an AI contribution policy.
This is like saying "overall laws are bad" because whoever is applying them is doing so maliciously. Even in the absence of COC companies like this always find a way to justify this sort of pressure. If not a COC, it's a TOS or NDA or whatever document acronym you can find.
Nobody would accept the rule of law if we didn't all know the alternative was the local bullies with the most friends and guns declaring themselves warlords and selling your family into slavery.
An open source project without a CoC on the other hand is quite normal and harmless. Maybe some people sometimes get their feelings hurt, but CoCs obviously don't prevent that anyway. The whole thing is dumb.
I would argue that laws are “bad” if there’s no way to get a proper hearing when you’re accused of violating them. Laws should constrain both sides of the law (the person subject to them and the person enforcing them) otherwise they’re just arbitrary rules by the person with more power. And while that’s a perfectly valid way to run something, it’s dishonest to dress “arbitrary personal decisions” up in the trappings of law. And realistically that applies to all the things you listed, COC, NDA, TOS etc.
But if someone can just drag out a law and vaguely accuse someone else of violating that law and then enforce a punishment with no way for the accused to get a hearing or present their case and have a real chance to prevail, then yes I would say the law is bad.
They're a weapon of "social justice" - 90% of CoC rules are common-sense stuff that doesn't have to be said, combined with one or two "progressive" ideas shoehorned in.
I was once told I couldn’t present a calorie counting/diet app at an Elm conference because it violated their CoC about discrimination based on “body size”.
This can sometimes, in practice, be reasonable. If letting muh_dick_1488 open PRs means everyone else stops contributing, well, you're gonna have to pick a group to keep.
What is purview, and why should a software project be allowed to police all aspects of life and communication because "them's the rules and rules is rules!"
In the same way that any other organisation has rules, which they agree amongst themselves.
The joy of a free (as in not being arrested) society is that if you don't like those rules you are free not to join. Or free to moan about them repeatedly until everyone dogpiles on them to change the rules, or not.
Either way, they are allowed to make rules how they like. Just as you are allowed to not like those rules, and talk about it incessantly.
As I said, CoCs are just rules, some of which _you_ don't like
I mean, that probably depends on how extreme are the views? If you write a blog post about there being too many colored people in London, how are non-white developers supposed to collaborate with you?
Perhaps by minding your own business and focusing on the work? Nobody is forcing you to view that person's blog or to even know it exists.
If that individual's viewpoints somehow visibly leak into their work or professional communications, then you might have a case for complaint or concern.
You are just denying people their freedom of association. I personally wouldn't want to associate with a racist for the simple fact that he is a racist, no matter where they display their racism.
Sounds good - you're free to not associate. The original topic at hand was a code of conduct: this is forcing your "freedom of association" on to everyone else.
That's demanding too much from minorities IMO. OK, you should tolerate a racist colleague, what about a racist boss? Like, you know he'd like to see fewer people like you, and also gets to decide about your promotion or layoff.
Again, why are you stalking these people - just ignore it?
Furthermore, by codifying and enforcing whatever your personal viewpoints are in a code of conduct, you've summarily decided for everyone else as well.
Reading what someone has written under their own name for everyone to read is not stalking.
Also not sure what code of conduct you have in mind, but most specify that you should treat others with respect regardless of <list of protected characteristics>. That's not a viewpoint, that's a necessary condition for collaboration. If you feel an uncontrollable hate towards people of some nationalities or gender identities, it would be wise too keep it a private matter indeed, and not make this hate known to everyone
The point that you seem to be missing is that these are projects open to the public: if the person isn't espousing these ideas in the space in question, you're just as intolerant as they are to try and use the color of authority (a code of conduct, etc.) to bar them from those spaces.
"Treat with respect" is a dog whistle - easily coopted for whatever nefarious reason.
"If you do not agree with me, you will not participate in any space where I can drum up enough sympathy (headache) to have you excluded from."
That's why it was kicked into overdrive during/after Occupy Wall Street. The message of bankers screwing over everybody else in the country had clear broad appeal and people were paying attention and talking about the issue. Then, newspapers started reporting that the OWS protestors were using a "progressive stack" to silence white men and give all the talking time to the freak squad... I don't even know if that narrative had any truth or if the newspapers made it up whole cloth, but regardless it was something most American's certainly could never agree with, so OWS was overnight transformed into a social justice freak show in the eyes of the public and people stopped talking about bankers.
Teensy's closed bootloader, USB stack, hardware design are what is proprietary. But the toolchain is open. Eg: I can use PlatformIO, etc.
From my perspective an open alternative would splinter the community rather than replace it. Developers value Teensy's polish & consistency (PAnd this is Paul Stoffregen's discipline).
If you endeavor to follow this path, you'd see adoption from transparency advocates and research/security-focused devs, but pragmatists like myself would stick with what works and what's affordable.
Your real problem is replicating that engineering rigor in an open-source project, is a lot harder than it looks. Let me give an example; STM32 is more open but shows us exactly what fragmentation looks like without unified vision.
Trying to parse as I am not in the know. Nate is Nate Seidle, CEO of SparkFun Electronics?
I know SparkFun recently took over Paul Stoffregen and Robin Coon's Teensy production (I reached out at the time and Paul said it was cool).
I'm guessing Adafruit got a special deal in purchasing Teensy's from SparkFun but because of an allegation made by you against Nate, they are responding by dropping your entire product line?
Anyway, good luck to everyone involved. It's a small community of companies that provide for makers.
Can't say I blame them though. Paul and Robin are two people. Sparkfun (and Adafruit) are massive by comparison and have big stores that sell the same sort of stuff in much higher volume. The Teensys are popular. Sparkfun does (or at least used to do) board assembly in-house. It seems like a perfect match on paper.
Paul and Robin were awesome to work with and it was disappointing to see them stop handling their own distribution, but I totally understand the desire to move away from even just the mental overhead involved.
I am completely out of loop here. I think I may have heard about adafruit once.
Your comment seemed the most information to me (and thank you for that) but can you please sum up the whole controversy from what allegations were made and everything because I was sensing that adafruit was in the right earlier but (now I am not?)
I feel like I would benefit a lot if you can tell me the whole controversy if possible. Thanks in advance!
Hi phil, appreciate the supposed candor here. I'm just an uninvolved HN observer interested in piecing together all the details of this dispute, here are some follow-up questions:
- The first public claim is that you engaged in targeted social-media harassment of an individual ('discatte') [1], linking various personally-identifiable information to their public profile without consent (name, email and gmail profile pic), and further intentionally misgendering/dead-naming them after being made aware that this was harmful. Do you have any sort of public response to these claims, denying or apologizing for this behavior?
- The second public claim is that the email report you sent to Sparkfun [2] was not simply a 'report' of harassing actions, but itself crossed the line into further harassing behavior ('hi jerks', 'you monsters', etc). Did you really, as claimed, copy the former employee's fiancee's current employer in these email threads as well? Any other context on why this unrelated employer needed to be brought into your dispute?
- Not only SparkFun, but it appears you were also banned from Fossoton [3] for CoC violations related to the dispute with discatte, correct? Any other context on this ban?
- It appears that you also sent another user harassing messages to their Etsy account [4] after objecting to your 'doxxing' of discatte's personal information and blocking you elsewhere, and they reported to you Etsy's trust and safety team. Any other context on this separate incident of alleged harassment?
I don’t know what’s going on here but it is super funny to link to [2] and only quote “hi jerks”
> nick has been telling people about the grand old time you two had at limor’s expense, my expense, and others. he says you sat around making memes about us, registering domains, the whole thing.
> you removed [limor’s] name on code. you scraped our site until it crashed and then emailed to get unblocked so your team could keep using our guides. you squatted on the adafruit name for usb stuff. that’s just a sample of the greatest hits. can you "compete" without doing this? did it even work?
Yes, the broader context of that email chain is a broad unloading of a 'greatest hits' of a decade of grievances against SparkFun (the meme site mentioned was made in 2017, by an employee who no longer works there).
I quoted the lines that seemed to most obviously tip that particular email exchange beyond a measured harassment report (as originally implied), crossing the line into what could be reasonably considered 'unappropriately aggressive behavior' (to quote the SparkFun CoC).
I would agree that the ex-employee's 'Sincerely, Fuck Off' was similarly aggressive, but less relevant since he's no longer an employee anyway, and it seemed pretty clear that he was the one being subject to targeted harassment in this instance (having accusations being forwarded to his partner's employer) rather than the other way around.
Not to split hairs here but it doesn’t look like he said it was a measured harassment report. Having worked customer service and HR, it’s somewhat common for people reporting harassment to be irate or even downright rude, especially when they feel that they’re being ignored.
The idea that calling someone a jerk is grounds for a company to ignore a serious complaint is, paradoxically, what some people describe as their reason for being rude.
Anyway I don’t know what’s going on here but “Sparkfun has ceased its business relationship with Adafruit because a guy called us jerks in a complaint about our CEO” would be hilarious
> it doesn’t look like he said it was a measured harassment report.
If splitting hairs, he originally framed the response as 'kill the messenger', implying there was no other reason for them be offended by it, misleading at least.
> Anyway I don’t know what’s going on here but “Sparkfun has ceased its business relationship with Adafruit because a guy called us jerks in a complaint about our CEO” would be hilarious
I agree, in isolation- it seems reasonable to end a business relationship with any rude or hostile partner regardless, but hiding such a decision behind a CoC rationale just for being called jerks would indeed border on 'hilarious'.
In this case, the claim is that the note was also sent to the ex-employee's partner's current employer, which enters less-hilarious territory towards borderline harassment, not a private HR complaint but public defamation.
Taken as one instance of a broader, ongoing pattern of targeted harassment of several individuals, the combined set of public complaints make the CoC reference not at all amusing.
> Taken as one instance of a broader, ongoing pattern of targeted harassment of several individuals, the combined set of public complaints make the CoC reference not at all amusing.
Having read more about all of this it sort of just seems like two dudes that hate each other.
Like for example the Adafruit guy’s complaint that the Sparkfun guy was presently posting about the domain and meme thing was objectively correct, Sparkfun guy posted a screenshot of it in his thread about the Adafruit guy (it stood out because the ‘Gen X hackers want to be Spider Jerusalem’ bit made me laugh out loud. Amazing burn, no notes)
Where I come from, calling the employer of a spouse of the person you're beefing with is such a low down scumbag move, nobody would be particularly surprised if it culminated in a hot blooded murder. Anybody who engages in tactics like that is scum. If both sides of a dispute act like that, I hope they both succeed in destroying each other.
user: xyzzyxy created: 2 hours ago ... ok, so you created it for this...
the individual you reference had already been removed from multiple retro and maker communities prior to this dispute for documented behavior. i contacted them privately using an email address they themselves used on the site they used, specifically to ask for a stop to the pile-on and to see whether there was a constructive way to resolve their grievance. their email included their first name, which i used in direct reply. there was no campaign, no public exposure of private information, and no intent to harm. labeling that interaction as “doxxing” is a distortion that collapses any private contact into wrongdoing.
with respect to sparkfun, yes, i sent a direct email to the founder, and ceo (and contacts i have there) calling out what i believe is a long-standing bully culture tolerated at the top. calling a company out for behavior is not harassment, even when the language is blunt. during this same period, fake accounts using my handle appeared and mass-reporting was clearly underway. my real account was likely caught up in that. retroactively attributing moderation actions for saying their first name on their email is inaccurate.
the various bans you cite did not occur after some calm, independent review of facts. they occurred in the middle of coordinated reporting, they said so.
as for etsy, i asked a seller who was publicly accusing me of “doxxing” a question: would placing an order would expose my personal information? that was it, there was a sticker in my cart already, i know this maker's work. etsy declined to take action that i know of, i just an etsy order, no ban (i did not buy the stickers). recharacterizing that as harassment is another example of inflation through repetition.
what your summary consistently excludes is the long, documented history of nate’s behavior and the impact it has had on employees, collaborators, and partners over many years. i dealt with that for a decade. i am not doing that anymore. drawing a line cost us purchasing a closed source board that only sparkfun makes, so we're doing an open source version.
> user: xyzzyxy created: 2 hours ago ... ok, so you created it for this...
Yes, indeed, given the claims of targeted harassment of random participants this thread is dealing with, I preferred to avoid being personally targeted next just for being another random participant. Others will have to trust that I'm not previously involved, just a HN observer trying to make sense of the details of this dispute now that it spilled over here.
> their email included their first name, which i used in direct reply. there was no campaign, no public exposure of private information, and no intent to harm. labeling that interaction as “doxxing” is a distortion that collapses any private contact into wrongdoing.
Maybe I missed something, but this wasn't a simple reply to a private email as you seem to imply- it was a public social media post linking their name to their account (which they had specifically avoided for privacy purposes), not edited/removed after it was made clear that the exposure of that information was harmful to them, and the misgendering/dead-naming was repeated in subsequent communications after it was made clear that this behavior was unwanted. Is any of that inaccurate?
> what your summary consistently excludes is the long, documented history of nate’s behavior and the impact it has had on employees, collaborators, and partners over many years. i dealt with that for a decade.
Not having been involved at all, I know nothing about the 'long, documented history' of grievances between you all, but if there are missing details that would help further clarify what the dispute here is really about, feel free to go beyond a 'vague public accusation' and share them directly.
Hi Phil, sorry to hear that something went down and involved Limor... that's not cool. A few Q's:
1. Will the freenzy be a 100% drop-in replacement for the teensy?
2. Will the freenzy be able to be programmed using teensyduino?
3. PJRC's bootloader is closed-source (I know, I've built 1000 Teensy-LC's after the product's discontinuation). Does that mean you're sourcing bootloaders from PJRC or reverse engineering the bootloader chip?
Opinion 1: If I can't take code written for a Teensy and upload it straight to the Freenzy, then this is not "Teensy Compatible". Likewise if the pinout is not the same, including all of the rear pcb-pads.
Opinion 2: If this is not actually Teensy Compatible, but just "Teensy Inspired", what about branding this as adafruit's own microcontroller and not cut into Paul and Robin's income by selling a totally different product that rides on their name recognition and decade of work?
I understand selling the Teensy line is out of your control, but what does “support” mean exactly in this context? Will related materials stay on your site?
I really hope this doesn’t lead to “boycott” of Teensy per se. I completely sympathize with tensions running high but please reconsider for the good of the community.
Documentation yes, but also Adafruit has very active support forums where customers can ask questions which get answered either by the community, or Adafruit employees, or both.
Sorry, I misunderstood Adafruit's position and therefore your question. It's weird that they would stop supporting anything they sold, even if they now want nothing to do with it. (They still have five forums for x0xb0x for pete's sake.) I guess they are trying to make a clean break and want to pour all resources into Freensy.
a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business, "This message is to formally confirm that SparkFun Electronics intends to issue applicable royalty payment for Q4 2025 no later than January 31, 2026, in accordance with previously established timelines."
i get it, they want to keep selling those products. this was probably about money and margins.
> a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business,
The linked website indicates this decision was made on or around Jan 7. Your own liked page is dated for the 12. Unless you’re asserting that the decision was made and effective before Q4 2025, this sounds like them putting in writing that they intend to follow through on preexisting contractual obligations for prior sales. Not really “doing business with while not doing business” IMO.
This post is not a good look. You come off as quite snide. In particular, things like "Sparkfun will not?", calling a CoC concern a weirdo behavior, responding to harassment allegations by saying the did it first.
This seems very much like two businesses experiencing friction and separating, which happens all the time. You coming in and framing the flames makes doesn't scan particularly positively to me.
I really wish your comment also had some capitalization and punctuation so it was easier to parse. Even ChatGPT had different interpretations.
But PT (sorry, I guess it’s stylized, pt) has written like this for years, long before the recent LLM-based AI revolution (maybe given his position in the tech community he had much earlier insight into what the machines want). It has been one of the reasons his messages always seem aggressive, IMO.
It's funny because he tried to excuse it in another comment by saying he's using speech-to-text. I really don't understand what this lie was supposed to accomplish since he seems to be the only person using a STT system incapable of proper capitalisation.
Can't speak specifically for this site, but these days many prove-you're-human tests have been added because of overzealous AI scraping eating server resources unnecessarily and to an unreasonable and excessive degree.
What kind of blog gets flooded by what, 10/100 req/s at max? Seems somewhere along the line we forgot how to deploy and run infrastructure on the internet, if some basic scrapers manage to down your website.
I have a disconnect here too, which makes it feel like I'm missing something. I'm hit so often with very onerous captcha-like demands or just blocked entirely when trying to make a single page or login request. I understand restrictions for rate limiting and things, but at this rate it feels like it's only a matter of time before the whole web is behind voluntary ID-scan requests for "security" even if laws never come to pass.
Looks like you guys are handling it right from a consumer standpoint. Thanks for letting us know and for not playing the fingerpointing game in public. Looks like you're not playing at all and just moving on. Nice.
The post you are replying to literally is playing the finger pointing game. They level accusations right back at spark fun.
I have zero skin in this game, and personally think the right move is for Adafruit to simply say, "We wish Sparkfun the best of luck" and move on, but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.
This would mean admitting the allegations are 100% true and harming their business even more with the risk of losing it all in worst case. Now we can assume it's not as simple as SparkFun makes it. It's a dirty situation, but necessary, and justified if they are really a victim.
> but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.
SparkFun started the war, AdaFruit seem to only defend here.
No bone in this fight, but in this day and age, when someone levels an accusation of unspecified "code of conduct violation", I automatically think "oh, geez another sex pest". And of course start reading because I can't resist tabloid gossip either.
Some amount of defense is appropriate just to clear the air. Maybe this has gone too far, but hey, we're all still reading. I don't even know what a Teensy is.
While SparkFun may feel entitled to air their grievances as an "Official response", these types of public statements aren't productive for business nor useful/respectful to consumers.
Public notices for the consumer should serve the consumer. I.e. they should only relate to matters that directly concern them, such as notice of availability, warranty, support or the fulfilment of other consumers' rights. Those statements should be unambiguous and not allude to blame or personal tiffs.
While Sparkfun's statement touches on availability it merely does so as a vehicle for grandstanding and retaliation through gossip and drama. The fact that SparkFun notes it's a "private matter" yet chose to involve the public also makes SparkFun look unprofessional, even if they are 0% at fault for the circumstances.
Consumers put their trust in a company, it is disrespectful of that trust when trying to embroil them in personal affairs, they never agreed to that.
The statement that is published places blame, if not accusations of criminal behaviour, on their business partner.
IOW, they already overshared with the intent of damaging the reputation of their business partner.
In my mind, they are already behind; had they released the standard business line "Our relationship with $X has come to an end; we apologise for any inconvenience caused" I wouldn't be so quick to judge them.
But, now I *am judging them, because they clearly felt personally aggrieved by what happened, enough to imply the worst without actually coming out and saying what happened.
There certainly could be harm if it's false though, which is the whole point. And they did not give any information to affirm who's fault (if anyone) it was besides hearsay
I would rather they published nothing. There is no need to make any of this public. Just stop selling Adafruit products and stop selling to Adafruit. If anyone asks, then you can say "we don't do business with them any longer". The public doesn't need the rationale.
That's it. Everything else is dragging the community/customers into a fight that they didn't ask for.
Something more concrete like "on Tuesday at 9pm an adafruit employee sent an aggressive email which violated our COC by calling one of our employees a 'stupid fuckface'".
I don't think that level of detail would be a privacy violation legally and imo not morally either
If you can't publish a complete, detailed, specific description of what you're alleging, with names, dates, quotes, and whatever, then you publish absolutely nothing. Publishing vague and unanswerable accusations is scumbag behavior.
How about nothing and continue to resolve the matter privately? If you intentionally leave out important details and context then you're just manipulating public sentiment to gain leverage on the other guy.
if they didn't want to say more, they should have said less.
the way that normal serious businesses handle situations like this is to simply stop carrying the product, instead of publishing vague, unverifiable accusations of wrongdoing. and then if somebody notices and asks questions, you'd give a statement like "unfortunately we could not come to an agreement to continue our relationship with this vendor, but we're happy to be able to continue offering a number of other comprable products".
There is no right to privacy, but they may have an NDA. Also, if they get too specific, they could open themselves up to a libel lawsuit. Though, if they were consulting a lawyer I don't think there would be any release. Simply cut business ties, and move on, it happens all the time, and would leave room to patch things up later.
> Maybe the AdaFruit founder said something unacceptable like "it's OK to be white" or "a man can't become an actual woman just by pretending that he is." That might explain the conflict.
Why would you just invent identity politics issues to be mad about?
I'm still trying to put all the pieces together, but https://digipres.club/@discatte/115588660312186707 sure paints Adafruit as the bad party here, though I'm open to information which shows otherwise to understand better.
The collections of threads, statements, and accusations on both sides are some of the most unhinged things I have seen in a while, and I don't think any of this helps anyone. :')
this all reads like a bunch of nerds with difficulties assessing on where to draw the line. Is it really that hard to figure out that neither registering a domain to meme a person, nor going on a spazz-posting spree and messaging folks over etsy DMs is considered normal, adjusted behavior??
Over the years it’s kind of becoming clear that “running major businesses” is kind of orthogonal to “having emotional integrity”. In larger businesses it’s mediated by layers. But just take a look at some of the deranged tweetstorms we’ve become used to in recent times.
Really? Normally it's just like: "Can we access your contacts list so we can match your 'friends'?" And then you do it and it shows you the list of matches. It doesn't ask each individual "Hey, do you want to be matched to this person?" unless you try to friend them. Most ask you when you sign up and usually somewhere in the settings if you want to enable email matching for your account though. So if that's on it's kinda just part of the system unless you turn it off.
Is it? It was (as far we know) a mild shitpost of a public figure like from a decade ago. Photoshopping someones head over the Pepe Silva meme is not nice, but its hardly harassment. To me the "worst" thing was registering the domain, which he gave to Torrone and apologized quite well in my opinion https://gist.github.com/NPoole/d9aab9dfa2a18f4141039f7ce3505....
Sure, if this was a pattern of behavior it would be ridiculous to play the victim, but there isn't as far we know. 9 years later, Torrone starts Mullenweg-posting because some random criticized him for AI stuff. He posts their private email taken from a receipt and when blocked he continues with sock-puppets. Sparkfun guy gives a (quite measured) opinion colored by the fact that Torrone is still is doing this shit to random people. Torreone acusses the Sparkfun guy of being his personal Moriarty.
The most unhinged (and cowardly) thing to me is bringing up his partner and his newborn at every turn in his Twitter shitflinging, when any "slights" just seem only directed at him.
(Dude, if you are reading this just log off, this might literally just sleep deprivation. Take focus on caring of your child instead of fighting on the internet)
And he apologized to you and handed the domain over to you.
And now you've decided, 8 years later, to blow up your relationship with a number of other folks in the industry, over a shitpost and some mild criticism?
Please, for the love of god, just drop this whole thing. Dredging this up from years ago has lost you a supplier of a popular product already, and a number of customers. I know a bunch of people who used to want to buy from the cool woman owned hacker manufacturer, and now won't touch it with a 10 foot pole after everything you've done.
And please, for the love of god, stop hiding behind Limor when people are criticizing you. You have repeatedly claimed that people are harassing Limor, when every single piece of criticism I've seen here has been directed at you or the Adafruit social accounts that you post through. And stop using your child as a shield as well.
You are a public figure, and sometimes people are going to disagree with you. They might find your use of GenAI image models to be problematic. They may find your over-hyping of drama happening in the open source hardware community to be a bit much. But you know what? That's OK. People can disagree with you, and make jokes about that disagreement.
But claiming that you are being harassed because people occasionally make a joke at your expense, blowing up relationships with your suppliers, driving away customers because you expose emails and deadnames (or legal names, in cases where people go by pseudonyms online), and doing it all while using your wife and child as a shield is not very professional behavior.
Step back, take a deep breath, pick your battles, own up to your mistakes, apologize for the places where you've gone wrong, and stop using your wife and child as a shield, and maybe you can repair some of this reputational damage. But you really need to get some distance from this.
I don't have a bone in this race, but if someone has deliberately hidden their identity online, knowingly disclosing that is malicious, regardless of any other morality involved.
Consider people who have their public persona very deliberately obfuscated, like Banksy, or Chuck Tingle - it's very intentional that both of them do not disclose that, and if you found out either of their legal names, and disclosed it publicly, it would be with deliberate intent to subvert them.
Or consider if someone posted online they had a beer, and they lived somewhere that considered that an egregious crime even if they did it somewhere that it was legal. If you deliberately released proof that the person posting "I had a beer" was this person, it would have malicious intent, regardless of how you feel about the morality of beer.
> if someone has deliberately hidden their identity online, knowingly disclosing that is malicious
That argument breaks down if the person hiding their identity is doing malicious things. If you hide behind anonymity and you're harassing people and sending threatening or hateful messages, disclosing their real identity is a public service.
Or could I set up an anonymous account, doxx people all day long for the lulz, and then cry wolf when you doxx me for being a prick? :)
If someone punches you, and you punch them back, you're being hostile, but so are they, and a lot of people would say that was reasonable.
If you deliberately go find someone's secret that they hid after you think they hurt you, and disclose it, it's because you're trying to hurt them, justifiable or not.
People seem to throw the words "doxxing" and "harassing" very lightly these days, if you ask me, although I'll give that nobody in this whole mess seems to be capable of calm or even non-violent communication.
Probably the key to eventual clarity is at PJRC's forum. PJRC makes Teensy. Imho it's a great product, and the owner, Paul Stoffregen, a great engineer and person from my experience using their products.
1. SparkFun and Adafruit are in conflict
2. SparkFun manufactures Teensy under license from PJRC
3. SparkFun cuts off Adafruit as a reseller
4. Adafruit can no longer sell Teensy
5. Adafruit posts on PJRC forum announcing an open-source Teensy competitor
6. Paul posts that it's outrageous in terms of etiquette that they're announcing a competitor on his forum. Adafruit's own forum only allows discussion of Adafruit products.
? This may be one of those "90% of the audience doesn't care and is increasingly less likely to buy from either vendor the more they fight in public" situations
Gotta love corporate skub fights. Honestly neither side is coming out looking good here.
If you’re not doing business with someone anymore, just drop their products. You don’t owe folks an explanation other than “unfortunately we do not carry that product anymore.”
It’s not just carrying their products. They are the exclusive producer of Teensy boards and are distributing them to many resellers but not to Adafruit.
Okay? That’s entirely their choice though. A supplier can absolutely cut off a reseller for whatever reason they want to, and no explanation is needed from either party. All I’m seeing from both sides is some attempt to “get ahead of” the other’s discourse, which is just resulting in a Streisand effect that makes both look bad to different degrees.
The only winning move is to just shut the f*k up and move on.
Sparkfun redid their site a couple years ago and nuked the links to all product pages of retired products too. A shame. I found someone's archive of the old site at one point, but I've since misplaced it.
Is "by design" supposed to imply a negative scheming aspect, or am I reading too much into your comment? This page won't really be relevant to anything after a couple months, so if the link breaks I don't think there's a big problem.
I can't comment on this matter because I don't know the details. However, based on my personal experience consuming Adafruit products and their generous open-source approach, I personally trust Adafruit very much.
Ok, so what's the drama? Because it's obvious that there was some drama there: "inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter," "Responding and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material."
My guess is someone was trying to hit on someone and got mad when they were rejected.
This post [0] suggests that leadership at SparkFun has been engaged in a long term harassment campaign targeting the founder of AdaFruit (Limor Fried) using company resources, and is allegedly using their CoC as a smokescreen to cover up their own bad behavior and cast blame on the victim.
if they didn't want people to speculate on the details, they could have released a more professional message instead of what they have here.
seriously the level of unprofessionalism at this scale of the market is shocking. you can't imagine e.g. Nvidia putting out a press release like this when they drop a vendor
Sparkfun is publicizing the enforcement of their code of conduct, making it a public issue, which is a bizarre position to take. Usually, when there are violations of things like this, you don't discuss it outside a need-to-know basis.
I'm not involved with this specific case, but in general it's annoying when people blast some vague passive aggressive accusation publicly, but then retreat behind "it's a private matter! Respect our privacy!" when people are then naturally are interested in what happened. It's frequently cover for a weak argument.
I don’t know what’s going on, but I checked what Teensy is up to these days and it seems that last March they decided to outsource manufacturing and direct sales to SparkFun:
AdaFruit and SparkFun both provide MCUs, sensors, and other peripherals that integrate well. Couple that with copious libraries and example projects and you may be up and running without having to stare at data sheets and wiring diagrams and JTAG output just to (say) get a temperature reading and display it on a tiny OLED screen.
All of that plus maintaining inventory nearer their customers, doing effective QC on units they ship, writing good docs, etc. means you’re getting something a lot more like a “big OEM” experience from the hardware vendor, even if you’re ordering a handful of parts.
The generic AliExpress vendors, in my experience, do not do most of those things. They all support Arduino and/or PlatformIO, and sometimes a “native” SDK like mbed, but you’re often on your own figuring out how to integrate that bare MCU with other devices you need for a complete solution. Docs are often incomplete or untranslated, and it can be hard to know exactly which chip (or associated components like onboard sensors and BME) is on there. It can change between board revisions, or even identically-named parts from different vendors.
There are other players like M5 and RAK who make nice modular platform as well, but their prices tend to be up there with AF and SF.
Both Adafruit and Sparkfun manufacturing quality is higher than generic manufacturing from China. I suspect that most of the Chinese alternatives meet their price point by using parts that are out of spec and were purchased at a discount by the chip manufacturer (or just scrounged for free from the reject pile).
The board is open source and there are tons of options made in China, often on a purple PCB. I've had terrible experiences with them, over 50% of the purple boardss I've purchased fail to achieve PLL lock because of multiple reasons- sometimes replacing the crystal can get it locked, but sometimes the chip is just out of spec and can't get a lock. Occasionally I'll get a lock on one PLL and the board is partly useable. I've given up dealing with the hassle and now I just spend the extra few dollars to get a breakout that uses parts sourced from authorized distributors that meet quality control standards. Plus this gives the profits to the people who designed the board and released it as open hardware.
I've also learned the hard way that breakout boards from Chinese retailers that look like the real thing but cost less than the price of the component from DigiKey in bulk are a pile of crap.
Whilst it is great that the hardware is open, I have come to the point of not caring that much as it just seems to mean that the market gets flooded with things that look very similar but are terrible. And in the case of that Si chip, it's really just the reference circuit from the manufacturer from what I see.
Adafruit dev boards are way more expensive than Chinese alternatives but I've never used an Adafruit board where I went "why in the world did they do X", where X is some design choice (except having a bright LED light up while the board had power). On the other hand I've had Chinese boards that have a battery jack but an always-powered component on the board uses like 10+mA at all times when alternative choices for the same component use literally hundreds/thousands of times less power (but cost 1 cent more).
I’ve found that adafruit usually includes a cuttable solder pad for the power led when there’s real estate available. Just cut one of those traces this week in fact!
Adafruit is basically the best but their whole reside-in-NYC philosophy makes zero sense. The contention that they can hire better people in NYC holds no water because over 50% of what they pay their employees goes to 3 layers of governments with no meaningful benefit AND their people pay NYC rents.
They could literally halve their prices or double their pay if they moved to Jacksonville or similar. And their employees would get daily sunshine and own a house, instead of inhaling 100 year old dust in the subway everyday, commuting from their tiny 1BR apartment. It boggles the mind.
not everyone who works at adafruit works in our industry city, brooklyn factory. we've been doing remote before it was a thing, you can check out our shows or ask before assuming the worst, but whatevers, you made up your mind and want us to move to florida.
I would love to use Adafruit boards in my production, but I have to resort to custom Chinese PCB stuff to be competitive. I don't want anything, but taxes and CoL is basic business logic.
SparkFun is in Colorado, which isn't a low tax state but their cost of living is still lower. So all else equals, they are going to earn maybe 5-10% more profit on the sale of a commodity item like a Teensy. You have better products than they do, all else equals you could earn 25%+ more than them, by simply moving to greener pastures, whether that be NC, TN, NV, or FL.
>simply moving to greener pastures, whether that be NC, TN, NV, or FL
Yeah, but then they’d be in NC, TN, NV, or FL which, frankly, sounds absolutely miserable. They made the right choice by being in NYC.
Adafruit seems to be doing very well where they are. Why would they want to suffer in such junk states like those with worthless governments when they could continue to be where they are and are happy? They’d also be scraping the bottom of the barrel in those places for talent for the necessary in-person positions. The stars up mentioned sure are cheaper, and they still cost more than they are worth.
As a long time internet user and consumer of products from both Adafruit and Sparkfun, I don't think your participation in this thread is doing you any favors. Like others here, I advise de-engaging with this debacle for now.
Adafruit products work as advertised, and are very well documented. Sparkfun is similar though their level of documentation is (IME) a bit more hit and miss.
For rando parts you get from rando vendors, it’s pretty common for schematics to have mistakes, pulldown resistors to be kind of off, and other components to be low quality.
For prototype development work, I’d rather spend a few dollars to have reliable parts that can be easily reordered than spend hours or days tracking down issues in parts that can’t always be reordered.
For post-prototyping and production work, you’re probably spinning boards anyway, and your choices and risks are pretty different.
For me, it's the Teensy 4.x boards. I have uses that consume all of their horsepower. I'm just a researcher, and my prototypes will be commercialized by an engineering team that will use the same microcontroller but on their own board and developed under their preferred auspices.
It's the closest I can get to an FPGA within my skill set.
Also, I think that Paul has been exemplary in his contributions to the open source community despite his own product having a closed component.
Adafruit in particular is very good at providing step by step tutorials on how to use their products, most of them that are nontrivial have a little example project to go with them.
It's also been a good one-stop shop, if you want a little character display to go with your esp32 project they will have one, along with addressable LEDs, battery circuitry, etc.
Olimex are a better middle ground than sparkfun or adafruit for the things they cover.
In truth people will spend a lot of money paying other people to shop on Aliexpress for them so they can maintain the illusion they are above all that.
Personally, I've had absolutely miserable experiences trying to get products on Aliexpress.
I have at least 3 paid for orders that literally just never showed up (18650 charger, and two LFP 24v chargers). It's not a huge sum of money (~$45) but it's just... gone. Poof - into the ether. It's been more than 24 months.
I also have had orders take 3+ months to actually arrive. Consistently. And some products that do show up but are absolutely unfit for purpose (ex - copper wire that IS NOT COPPER).
Given the complete lack of reliability... I now avoid aliexpress for pretty much everything.
So sure - something like sparkfun/adafruit/etc is going to charge me an overhead, but that overhead ensures
1. The product will roughly work
2. The product will show up
3. The product will show up on a reasonable timeline
----
The extra money isn't so I can have an illusion that I'm "above all that"... it's literally just setting a baseline service level that I don't mind paying extra for, because aliexpress isn't a reliable shop (and is borderline scammy as fuck).
You usually get stuff for 1/10 to 1/3 the cost. The counter is sometimes you have to do a refund. If you have more money than time, then don't buy from them.
I have always supported Adafruit -- Limor's principles shine through in the products, the website, the tutorials, and in the long-term track record of standing by their products. Even when I can source things from AliExpress, I often get them from Adafruit.
Speaking for myself, SparkFun has lost me as a customer.
Obviously given the lack of information (maybe for the best?) there's nothing really to comment on when it comes to the allegations
However, I do wonder what this will mean for Adafruit product availability in Europe, as most stores I know of that sell Adafruit products here are Sparkfun distributors.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the big players that I know ship and sell globally like Digikey, Newark and Arrow are all Adafruit distributors, and presumably that wouldn't change. Do you mean brick and mortar or something else?
Hmm... reads a bit like an email a forum moderator might send a disobedient user. This seems strange, verging on unprofessional, for corporate communications.
But I've always found Paul to be a good guy, who was helpful and honest and provided a great product. Teensy is a great platform, and it's too bad these other players will have a negative impact on it.
Incredible how Adafruit-sided this discussion is, having seen ptorrone serially creating alt accounts fediverse to harrass people who thought that his behavior was bad [1], going as far as to harrass people on their Etsy stores [2]. I do not expect anything he says to be truthful at all, after having seen how much abuse he spews out.
i asked if the person was going to "dox" me if i purchased a sticker that was in my cart already. there are multiple people making accounts using my handle, so i'm now on a server where there is some due process before fake reports or others pretending to be me.
> i asked if the person was going to "dox" me if i purchased a sticker that was in my cart already.
That implies you asked this of some random Etsy seller you happened to be interested in purchasing a sticker from, due to general privacy concerns. However, as I understand it, you instead tracked down the Etsy store of someone who had criticized and blocked you on social media, specifically to send them further unwanted messages related to your previous conversation about "doxxing" another user. Is this correct?
> there are multiple people making accounts using my handle, so i'm now on a server where there is some due process before fake reports or others pretending to be me.
Nick cited [1] specific since-suspended fediverse accounts linked to you: @ptorrone@fosstodon.org, @ptorrone@toot.community, @ptorrone@cyberplace.social, @ptorrone.bsky.social, @ptorrone@mastodon.nu. Are you denying involvement with those specific alt accounts, or just vaguely suggesting there might be other impersonators out there?
> However, as I understand it, you instead tracked down the Etsy store of someone who had criticized and blocked you on social media, specifically to send them further unwanted messages related to your previous conversation about "doxxing" another user.
I have zero knowledge of the drama beyond reading the posts here, but if this is true then that clearly falls into the harassment arena.
wow, I recommend people read the linked thread, it basically completely exonerates the "employee who made a hate site" with receipts. I came into this thinking adafruit was in the right, but wow
after reading all of these mastodon threads and gists, something really irks me.
this ptorrone guy acts in some pretty questionable ways and constantly uses his wife and kids as a shield. if someone gets harassed out of nowhere and their kids or spouses are being dragged into it, then that's truly a horrible, shitty thing to do. but to be involved in and start flame-wars, doxxing campaigns and more and then constantly having to mention that you have a newborn when people push back sounds pretty manipulative.
smacks someone on their neck, "don't hit me back, man, i got kids and a wife!"
As an uninformed observer, here is a possible sequence of events that sounds somewhat plausible based on what we know so far:
* sparkfun employee engages in some shitty behavior (maybe harassment, maybe photoshops) toward adafruit CEO
* adafruit engages sparkfun to ask them to put a stop to it
* employee leaves sparkfun
* employee continues shitty behavior
* adafruit continues to bug sparkfun about behavior
* sparkfun now has no control over employee, wants to wash their hands of it
* adafruit isn’t happy with this resolution, continues to push it, interprets inaction as tacit approval
* sparkfun cites CoC about private matters, inappropriate messages
* HN speculates :)
IMO what they did is pretty overblown. They did register a joke domain but basically folded and apologized immediately. Then nothing for 8 years, until they commented on a post where adafruit was accused of doxxing on mastodon.
Phil, based on this summary and reading the emails about what went down between you and Nick, you sound like an absolute lunatic. He mocked you once back in 2017. He set up a satirical website that had a single joke: you as obsessed detective, sniffing out perceived slights. Then, when called out on it, he very eloquently apologized for it, expanded on why he had done it, and offered an olive branch of friendship.
In response, you have absolutely flipped out on him. You've continuously attempted to expand his "crimes" into something against your wife, attempted to accuse him of misogyny, attempted to frame it as an attack on your kids, attempted to loop his employers into it, claimed you'd sue, and called him a bully. And later, when he made an offhand reference to this ordeal (to someone else you appear to be flipping out on), you accuse him of starting a new campaign of bullying. It's so completely out of scale that I have to question your mental state.
And the cherry on top is that in the middle of all this, you took a piece of information -- the fact that he has posted on social media about mental health issues -- and tried to leverage that into a claim that this is all his problem. I'm sorry, but that is absolutely disgusting behavior, and I hope you're ashamed of it.
Ah, that is pretty illuminating. Insert “adafruit employee / husband of CEO overreacts to internet squabbles and gets a little shrieky because he’s sleep deprived” in there somewhere.
This reminds me of the olden days of small messageboard drama. It’s a shame to see it affect a business relationship between two good companies. Maybe they’ll make up after it all cools off.
sparkfun will continue to use limor’s open source code, libraries, and designs. that is how open source works, and we are fine with that, and that is awesome!
what is not speculation is - paul (teensy creator) told us directly that sparkfun’s decision to block us from purchasing teensy was final. that was not a heat of the moment thing, and it was not handled through normal purchasing channels. i do not even purchase. our purchasing team does. the same is true of the royalty payments sparkfun has made to adafruit for over a decade under standing agreements. there is essentially no day to day interaction. i asked if they are going to keep paying those, no reply yet.
the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute.
no current sparkfun employee did anything wrong here. one former employee did, and nate’s behavior toward limor has been an issue for years. i am done with that and him, so that part will sort itself out now.
> the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute
That really doesn’t tell me anything. I would like to humbly suggest you’re very close to this issue, in an already stressful personal situation, and you’re reading things between the lines kind of aggressively and overreacting.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and I’m not saying whatever others did is ok, but I am saying that you aren’t improving anything by being here trying to litigate your case. I don’t think anyone who puts any thought into this can legitimately accuse you of anything except getting a little too worked up about it.
it seems like if i do not reply, it's worse? i totally get what you are saying, however i think we're part of this hackernews community too, and not here to litigate past issues, and i will probably always get a little too worked up when it comes to what i believe is a long history of a "competitor" doing things outside of "it's just business, get thicker skin" ...
Having read the whole thing in great detail, I’m going to try to give you an honest perspective. Your competitor has done nothing to you. Someone loosely connected to your competitor (used to work there) did something extremely mild to you, and you have been overreacting to it so egregiously that it splashed over into your relationship with another company, through no fault of theirs. It is now to the point that you have made a complete ass of yourself. If you had simply let it drop like an adult, Nick never would have dropped that incredibly damning (to you) email chain. You blew it.
Try this as a reply; "hello everyone. This seems to have all gotten out of hand. We want to continue selling teensy units, We've made a lot of sales working together and I want to salvage this working relationship and ensure we continue to do business together and sell as many Teensy units as possible. Why don't I, sparkfun and Paul Stoffregen get together for a zoom meeting next Monday and discuss this. At the end of the day I'm sure Paul S would prefer his product to be as widely available as possible and we want to help with that. Best regards - ptorrone".
That would be the mature and professional response which ensures continued sales for you, sparkfun and PJRC.
And for Christ's sake stop arguing business issues on social media and messaging boards. What are you doing, man?! :)
That's not necessarily correct. If you leave something standing without gainsaying it there is a substantial fraction of the viewers of the interaction who will come away with the impression that that party that did not speak up against the last comment lost the discussion because they ran out of arguments. This is so widespread that there are multiple names for the phenomenon and lots of good interaction has been ruined by it.
Obviously I don’t claim to speak for everyone else when I say it only seems that way to him. I’m being tongue in cheek. But I do think it’s the wrong instinct and the fact that some people agree isn’t reason to give into it.
You've already stopped replying, but I think an anecdotal stories might do you some good:
When I was 18, I had a situationship with a girl with abusive parents. One night she texted me to go get her because they were being awful (Mostly to each other) and she wanted to get away from it. When I took her back, even though they had told her she could go in the first place, they were angry with her for being out. The dad, angry with me, yelled at ~10PM and pointed a gun at me in my car.
Latter, the police came by my place and tried to give me a Disturbing the Peace citation. I felt wronged: My only involvement had been to remove a younger person from an already un-peaceful situation! The girl's dad had pointed a gun at ME. I wanted to defend myself.
My mom is a lawyer. She went with me to the station when the police wanted to question me, and she told me to just shut up. Don't answer any questions. Even if it was defending myself. Just. Shut. Up.
She was right, but it was still hard. At one point she kicked me pretty hard under the table to tell me to not talk as the office kept trying to get me to. By doing so, they didn't have enough evidence to do anything. They couldn't press charges, so nothing happened. I would've been innocent either way, and would've won any case, but it was sure a lot easier and avoid a waste of everyone's time for me to not defend myself, because by not defending myself then, I didn't have to waste time in court.
Years later, the incident itself is irrelevant. I doubt anyone else by my mom and I remember it - the notable bit was that the entire situation ended that night because I didn't let my strong desire to show my innocence and wrongful persecution win over the advice of my lawyer-mom telling to STFU.
Now, this isn't to say there aren't time where being very, very vocal is the right call. I could rant and rave to you about the time I really pissed in the cheerios of https://www.scanoss.com/ (With some of it happening here on HN, and me actually "Doxxing" one of their employees after he posted on the HN thread claiming to not be affiliated and accusing me of "falsifying information, impersonation, and even extortion" which was comical levels of bullshit.) but I had public opinion firmly on my side, getting constant pings in discord and slack servers as people wanted to know the latest juicy details and how I was sticking it to them.
But optics matter: It was a David and Goliath situation, where the entire incident happened in a short time frame, and as an individual I wasn't representing anybody other than myself. Those are the factors that change your situation.
You're involving Adafruit in drama and posting quickly, not as formal, adult response.
You're a golliath too, with Adafruit being a pretty big name that everyone in this community knows.
You're involving years old drama, where details are murky and intent and other relationships aren't easy to understand from the outside.
All of that combined makes you look bad, regardless of you're the "good guy" or "bad guy" here. Optics matter.
Sparkfun, by being vague and making an at least surface-level professional page here controlled the optics pretty well. It's only on the surface - as others point out, there's definitely some smells to it too - but rash, fast posting from an individual is what's making the optics bad for you - just like how the CTO of ScanOSS directly responding in my situation made him get over 100 thumbs downs on the GitHub thread in that story.
I think, honestly, that everyone involved - you, the person that's saying you dox'd them, Limor, etc. are great people doing great things that got a little too riled up and let things explode into public drama when really even just being the bigger person and making your FOSS Teensy pin-compatible board would've been retaliation enough in a way that nobody would've seen you as anything but the good guys for.
Honestly, if I were you, even if you believe you did nothing wrong, I'd apologize. Say you're sorry for using their real name. Say making extra accounts to contact them when they didn't want to be wasn't cool. Say you felt hurt, and have been stressed, but didn't realize how what you did would affect them. I honestly don't think you meant to dox anyone, because I don't think you saw it as doxxing. So say that, and say you're sorry. Probably in private first, if you mean it.
i’m catching up here. we have two kids. i dropped one off at pre-k this morning.
i replied to an email from a person whose full name was already in the email and is publicly listed on all of their sites. i said we should talk together about the pile-on. at the time, they believed we had done nfts. we never did.
i can and will apologize. i am not a double-downer. i like changing my mind. if this is the worst thing that happened to this person in their life, and a sincere apology would help, i am fully on board with that. i would mean it. why let something like this linger and turn into prolonged suffering.
there are no other examples anyone has pointed to of doxxing or misgendering. i believe i said “he.” that’s it. i am available, and they know how to reach me.
at the same time, there are people creating alt accounts, including ones using my handle. i see that pattern clearly. still, i understand what you are saying: that i should always take the higher road and be the bigger person, regardless.
my email is pt at braincraft d0t com, open to talk
Setting aside any concept of who's "right" or "wrong", if I got an email like this from the MD of a customer, I'd share it with my team, we'd all laugh a bit, take a deep breath, and find a way to de-escalate the situation.
Similarly if I were buying product from a supplier and they made an immature joke I found hurtful, I would probably just ignore it. If it was a recurring problem maybe I'd say "I really didn't appreciate when you <xyz>'d, can we keep this focused on business in the future?" And if that didn't solve things, I'd see if someone else could be assigned to handle the account.
I hope those examples don't minimize what either side is feeling, but I have to say that I don't feel I've seen anything in this thread that gets my blood pumping. Dealing with difficult or rude people is part of the job and part of life.
Taking things personally, especially in business, is a _very_ expensive luxury. And if that isn't convincing enough, if you still feel angry about it in a month you can usually yell at them later. But if you escalate today and feel foolish about it later, it's a lot more difficult to mend the wounds.
Everyone necessarily, axiomatically, thinks that the way they react to things is reasonable.
But not all other modes of existence are automatically unreasonable even if they are different from one's own definition of reasonable.
Even if I would opt to ignore something like that in some paticular case for whatever my reasons are, I would rarely presume to suggest that someone else should ignore something like that for whatever my reasons are.
SparkFun filled a very important gap for me during the downfall of RadioShack. Their Free Day was a source of excitement and goodies. Around the same time they realized the legal implications of Free Day and had to cancel it, (but not because of it) I started buying from Adafruit. Since then I’ve spent many thousands on their stuff. Even when I could get it cheaper elsewhere, I was OK spending more there because of their open source work. I even made a pilgrimage to their office when it was by Ground Zero.
I’m not sure I can find them now, but Sparkfun’s Nate has definitely posted public comments over the years that are not friendly to Adafruit, always clearly rooted in jealousy. One that comes to mind was him telling Adafruit to stop pretending they are an underdog and stop preening that they didn’t (at that point) have millions in sales. I totally believe Adafruit’s account of what Sparkfun was doing.
At the same time, Phil has always rubbed me the wrong way to - too aggressive and a bit rude, even in their own forums, including where they provide customer support on orders. The threads shared of his egregious behavior do not shock me in the least.
I guess this is a good of a reason as any to stop supporting both. I’ll save thousands and I won’t have a continuously growing supply of components for projects I’ll never get around to.
Wait is this actually an extension of the ~Nov ptorrone mastodon cryfest/freakout? I was kind of hoping that whatever manic episode was behind that had come to a close.
It's not clear from the top posts here what on Earth is happening. I've been a longtime customer of both Sparkfun and Adafruit for my kids. What do I need to know?
The only thing you need to know is Sparkfun doesn't distribute Adafruit products. There are other distributors you can find with a web search, or you can buy from Adafruit's website.
This is sad, and it doesn't reflect especially well on either party. Here's the thing, though: we evolved in a world where being expelled from the tribe was a death sentence. When people fall out, often their instinct is to try to preemptively convince everyone else that the other guy is the evil guy who should be kicked out. To convince everyone else to take a side.
We don't live in that world any more. You're not gonna die if you don't convince everyone that the other guy is the evil one. It's perfectly fine to decide that you just can't deal with someone else, and you can do that while accepting that you don't need everyone else to take a side or be convinced of your reasons.
The inevitable speculation will occur, in which I have no useful insight.
I will say adafruit have clearly been heading in a bit of the wrong direction lately. See the misleading noise about arduino, for example. Have to wonder if the whole tariff situation is hurting them and it is causing these ripples.
I did check on archive.org, and the code of conduct is there on March 2025. So they didn't just add it in the last month or so, and then send this notice.
> Unacceptable behaviors include but are not limited to: offensive comments, insults, jokes or ridicule; gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior in spaces where they are nor other unappropriately aggressive behaviors; threats of violence or deliberate intimidation; creating additional online accounts in order to harass another person or circumvent a ban; harassment of any form.
I can't help but wonder who decided that, in an electronics forum of all places, *any* form of joke should be unacceptable, but sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic!
You're absolutely correct and it's me who has mis-read that part. The point of the oddly relaxed wording on sexual images and behaviour still stands though!
> sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic
Well if someone was working on something like a medical device there might be some documentation that could be interpreted as sexual but that documenting it was not gratuitous.
The image would have to be topical, and the sexual nature would have to be necessary (not-gratuitous) for it to be compliant with that CoC.
I'd be surprised if such an image can exist in an electronics forum because those parameters are pretty narrow.
I also don't interpret policy as disallowing any form of joke.
I'm not about to go hunting, but I think I would find a good number of good non-offensive jokes, and probably no instances of sexual imagery.
I think that there might be a tad of seasonal depression affecting them here. My initial reaction was basically excitement at the drama, but then I remembered that I need to take my vitamins.
It's sad to see two good companies go at it, but I do like the reminder that they are run by actual humans with emotions. This is why we support independent businesses instead of corporations that act like they are run by robots, and likely will be run by robots soon.
Tbh I think both of y'all are a boon to people mucking about with hardware and that petty arguments, MBA parasite stuff, etc is all counterproductive but fight all you like.
I stopped buying stuff from SF/AF ages ago as I find it all overpriced for the most part (for my use cases). But then again I've not been doing too many hardware projects recently anyway.
Odd situation tho, both have been bastions of this stuff since forever.
I find this political mess to be interesting, but I'm not sure it's an appropriate topic of conversation for the "professional community."
It looks to me like people on both sides were bothering the other over and extended period of time and it got worse till it led to this.
Having seen similar over my career I don't understand what digging into this accomplishes besides making all sides more upset.
I do think it is wrong for the professional relationship ( continuing to sell technology ) to be ended over a personal dispute.
From where I stand it looks like Phil is attempting to defend himself by being open about what happened even though the whole situation seems unpleasant.
Besides that I think it is likely best if all sides in this just cease communicating or saying anything more and move on from the personal stuff.
I actually have a small lot of the Teensy boards for a USB hardware hacking project I was running for a while. For example, I used them to emulate a USB keyboard to automatically press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in Path of Exile over and over to avoid wrist strain during a time in that game where every player needed to constantly hit those keys in a loop to play at decently high levels.
These boards were an endless nightmare to work with. I had to cycle through many different USB controllers and it was really more like voodoo. I tried buying a few boards from different suppliers and every board had the same voodoo so I gave up and moved on.
I ended up getting ATtiny85 to work for what I wanted which sucked too, but at least it worked and was a fraction of the price so I could actually send them to all my friends.
I am unsure of the impact of this to the regular consumer as this seems like a pretty niche area. But it's kinda shitty that interpersonal relationships of two companies are impacting their customers negatively.
The onus is not up to public opinion or customer politics to resolve your schoolyard differences. We just want to buy your products and not get loaded with baggage. We don't owe you loyalty on top of the price we paid you for the product.
I tried to parse the history and it goes back to 2021 and apparently touches upon pronouns, NFTs, online unmasking and various online battles around the same. Sigh. Can we put this HN thread out of its misery, please?
Obviously we don't know details, and Phil has made an effort at responding. However, both statements are (deliberately?) vague, and Sparkfun's CoC is laughably short. I am all for the rules being "Don't be a dick" but such vagaries can hide arbitrary decisions. All the vagaries amount to "trust me, bro" statements and when two well loved groups (AdaFruit/Sparkfun) square up in a game of trust everyone loses, at least in the short term.
Hopefully this gets cleared up one way or another, in a clear way that means we won't be re-litigating this for the next decade.
It's all here in the comments, go ahead if you're entertained by high drama people trying to convince a crowd that they're on the good side. My main takeaway is that the lady with pink hair who made Adafruit and the guy who designs Teensy seem to be bystanders in this but end up both losing.
Wow, after following all of the links here, and wrap my head around this thing, it's hard to shake the feeling that this is merely the start of what will surely be a long and epic drama.
So why haven't the emails been published? Or at the very least, summarizing the contents of the emails that specifically violate the Code of Conduct. I assume NDA reasons, but I could be wrong.
No, it means anything they haven't shipped by the end of the day is being cancelled as an order. So I'm guessing they have very little inventory in stock or adafruit is contractually required to buy it back.
Looks like the prices of Teensy boards on adafruit.com are the same as before. Maybe the statement means they will continue to sell them instead of "on sale" in the sense of applying a discount.
Why publish this publicly? Now I wonder what really happened.
The SparkFun folks are cool. Back when I was a broke college student, they sent me free electronics kits. I massively respect them for that.
I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.
I'm guessing to get ahead of any sort of speculation on why Sparkfun stops carrying their products? Perhaps also to get ahead of Adafruit publishing a similar public statement with more/conflicting details?
I suspect they made this public because many customers will notice that they are no longer carrying Adafruit products. I respect both companies greatly and have purchased from them in the past. It will be interesting to see what happened, if that is made public.
> I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.
This aspect is not very surprising, it is usually moral high grounders who end up found to be doing something wrong, people like to compensate and try to put down others when they know they are in the wrong.
Why there is often so much drama whenever something open source or community is involved? The best we've got from the industry so far was Astronomer affair.
It's just a selection effect, the culture of openness means you are much more likely to see the drama.
That said, why does the Musk vs. Zuckerberg cage fight beef not spring to mind? Or Musk beefing just about any random day anyway?
Not to mention the whole "OpenAI going full corpo" drama, that was arguably a much bigger deal, something actually important instead of this small social media debacle.
Seeing how Adafruit recently misrepresented the Arduino acquisition to FUD people this is not surprising to me. Around 15 years ago they had great vibes but the recent stuff is just money grabbing.
But seriously, this illustrates to me that Codes of Conduct are mostly suspect. This is obviously a private feud (nobody looks to be in the right here and I don't care who started what), so to pull "they violated the CoC" is pure theatre and bullshit. I'm a Sparkfun customer and I find that really disappointing.
> Sending and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material to SparkFun employees, former employees and customers
> Inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter
Well those are fun accusations. Looking forward to adafruit response. Anyone has any context?
Keep in mind adafruit and sparkfun are business competitors. Not saying either is lying but statements need to be examined carefully. For what it's worth I've purchased from both many times and was always happy customer so this is sad to see.
> in july, we [Adafruit] told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order. for years, sparkfun's leadership ignored specific behavior from leadership (and employees, now former... they had created and promoted hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment targeting limor, me, and others at adafruit. this was done on company time, shared, promoted. this was reported to them. it was documented and ignored. that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_
> months later in 2025, the same individual resurfaced and re-promoted it with what appears to be nate's blessing at the time. we again told sparkfun to deal with this. instead of addressing the behavior, sparkfun’s response was to “ban” adafruit from purchasing teensy by invoking a vague, secret set of rules that neither we nor paul (the creator of teensy) were allowed to see.
> this is not a one-off. nate (the founder of sparkfun) has done this before. anyone who has worked with him long enough knows this is how conflict is handled: deflect, escalate, and try to punish rather than deal with the underlying conduct.
For context: This post by ptorrone suggests that leadership at Sparkfun has been engaged in a long running harassment campaign against the founder of AdaFruit (Limor Fried) and is now attempting to weaponize their CoC to cast blame on the victim in order to deflect from their own behavior[0].
for anyone still reading:
in july, we told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order. for years, sparkfun's leadership ignored specific behavior from leadership (and employees, now former... they had created and promoted hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment targeting limor, me, and others at adafruit. this was done on company time, shared, promoted. this was reported to them. it was documented and ignored. that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_
months later in 2025, the same individual resurfaced and re-promoted it with what appears to be nate's blessing at the time. we again told sparkfun to deal with this. instead of addressing the behavior, sparkfun’s response was to “ban” adafruit from purchasing teensy by invoking a vague, secret set of rules that neither we nor paul (the creator of teensy) were allowed to see.
this is not a one-off. nate (the founder of sparkfun) has done this before. anyone who has worked with him long enough knows this is how conflict is handled: deflect, escalate, and try to punish rather than deal with the underlying conduct.
we do not respond to bullying by backing down. we never have. that is why we are here.
For additional context to the context, here's Nick's account of the so-called 'long running harassment campaign' [1]: Nick made a joke site about Phil back in 2017, Phil emailed asking him to stop, Nick immediately transferred the domain to him with a heartfelt apology ("man... I just wanna be friends. I wanna support
you and Limor and also feel good about the place that I work (and kinda
live). [...] These social tools don't always translate, for that I apologize."), and they wrapped up the exchange on good terms.
I can't care less about what lead to this drama, but threatening people for building a compatible product is a shit move, sparkfun. They have every right to do this.
Not buying anything from you anymore until you back off from this stupid claim. Shame on you.
PT has always been a bit emotional and reactive, but he's usually on the right side of things. Though it's been many years since I have followed them closely.
I clicked one of the top level links ITT and mostly it was triggered by two grown-ass children having a disagreement about the ethics of using gen AI and deciding to hash out that disagreement by doxing each other instead of simply talking to each other. But yes, there's also pronoun stuff in the background here, because of course there is.
My new rule of thumb is to steer clear of anybody with a fediverse bluesky whatever account. The whole thing is an echo chamber for amplifying insanity.
Familiarize yourself with the 'peak male performance' meme and you'll understand my meaning.
Let me make it easy for you: She's killing it in what would appear to be a less than ideal circumstance. She's swatting down people messing with her business while raising a child.
your writing style in particular fits with a lot of autistic people I've seen, FWIW. but I don't support using "autistic" as an insult (it's honestly the opposite, IMO)
They know. Most of these green troll accounts are alts of older, established accounts that don't want to risk their karma and a ban on their main account.
Don't bother interacting with them. Just flag them and move on.
Quite frankly, whenever I see people going the public CoC accusation route instead of talking things out man-to-man or simply parting ways politely, I see man children who never learned to resolve problems in a mature manner without running off to get Mom.
Codes of conduct are an intersectional-feminist political demand, and are often explicitly justified in terms of protecting women and other marginalized demographics such as genderqueer people from what they view as harassment. Talking things out "man-to-man" is the opposite the discourse norm organizations with codes of conduct want to enforce.
The only thing this public dispute tells me is I should never do business with either organization. What is with childish adults dragging "drama" into the public spotlight? What is a "Code of Conduct".
I would have privately let them know we arent going to supply them anymore and wish them the best. That's it.
So it's only other people who can't criticize others in public, for you it's somehow not "DISGUSTING!".
In fact for you, you can even criticize others who haven't even done anything to you. You can do it as a pure 3rd party bystander. But no one else can do it even in response to direct attack.
Never cared much for either. Both are just insanely overpriced "maker" crap that ultimately comes from China anyway. You can get cheaper at AliExpress, LCSC etc.
They assemble their PCBs in New York, there's no chance they are actually manufacturing the PCBs themselves there however. PCB manufacturing is an ecological disaster.
This makes me think of Park Tools. Park sells bicycle tools. They design and produce an amazing breadth of products. They also produce an incredibly valuable library of instructional content about how to use these tools. Calvin Jones, their director of education, just announced his retirement after 28 years.
Anyway, they just teach you how to do the thing. They somehow haven't gotten into internet squabbles with their suppliers or retailers. I would just call it professional.
hi, phil here — post on adafruit here: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...
i’ll stop back and answer anything (sparkfun will not?).
sparkfun is the exclusive maker and distributor of the closed-source teensy and informed us we will not be able to purchase the teensy. this happened after i sent an email reporting the founder, nate, for multiple harassing actions directed at limor, including behavior by him and a former employee.
instead of addressing that, they decided to kill the messenger, me, and also cut us off from teensy.
so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters, we are doing an open-source alternative. so customers are not stranded, and this is not a supply chain emergency for us. looking forward to seeing which one delights customers more.
as much as nate wants to continue trying to damage limor’s business and adafruit by scraping our site, and now potentially not paying royalties owed after more than a decade of consistent payments, that’s nothing new. it’s a business strategy to cut others out, not a mystery or a “private drama.”
this is exactly why we do open source. when a closed product or exclusive channel is used as leverage, the correct response is to remove the leverage.
sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.
ask away!
If it means anything, the first thought I had reading this post was "I wonder how SparkFun is exaggerating or misrepresenting this situation, because I can't believe Adafruit of all organizations is in the wrong here."
> because I can't believe Adafruit of all organizations is in the wrong here.
I've been hearing about this drama through a group chat for a long time. To be honest, neither side looks good in this one. Both companies have behaved disappointingly at different times for different reasons. I'm not doing this is an arbitrary "both sides" dismissal. There have been actions from both companies that would have been unacceptable in isolation.
The OSHW world revolves a lot around conferences, social media, and IRC/Matrix/Discord servers. Not coincidentally, this feels a lot like old IRC and forum drama of years past.
Both companies are pretty small and presumably exist because their owners are passionate about hobby electronics. Honestly, I'd rather have companies like that ran by (flawed) humans than by PR robots.
If they want to air their dirty laundry in public, I'm happy to grab popcorn and watch. I'm honestly shocked by the number of folks on this thread who don't know the specifics, and most probably never even bought anything from Sparkfun or Adafruit, but still want to condemn one of the companies in the strongest possible terms...
It would be nice if people came out and explained exactly what the harassment, COC violations, etc were so we could make accurate judgements ourselves about all of this. And no, posting literally what happened or what was sent or said will not get you in trouble for libel unless you don't have proof of it happening.
This dancing around what was actually said or sent all reminds me of that meme, Dipshit289: dude you don't wanna know... Oh the horror...
Fwiw, there's this thread that seemingly explains what employee was doing the harassment - and shows Phil overreacting and exaggerating the 'harassment' itself, as well as misattributing blame: https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877
That makes me think much less of both Adafruit and SparkFun. I really, really wish all sides would simply put everything out for us to evaluate. Having to trust various unreliable narrators is not respectful to the time of all of us potential customers.
>To be honest, neither side looks good in this one. Both companies have behaved disappointingly at different times for different reasons.
ESH?
Thanks for the message. Which IRC channel should I join?
See additional context for the accusation(s) here[0].
[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
> sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.
Ok sure, but the explanation provided strikes me as equally vague. I don't think anyone who isn't familiar with this situation has any idea what the hell is going on between these two orgs tbh.
If a dispassionate observer can't figure out situation without significant effort, then it's very easy to handwave this away as unimportant.
Personally I'd very much hate for that to happen here if something truly noteworthy happened.
The problem is once you get into concrete specifics, you enter the realm of legal liability and potential libel, so it's all posturing until their adrenaline runs out, then they'll either reconcile (or not) behind closed doors.
You know, I think you're right. I recant what I said earlier. I actually don't think I should care about this matter at all.
In a more general sense, it seems best to me that people should just mind their own business and settle things like adults without giving into this pervasive and strange desire to be vindicated by their framing of the situation to others.
There is literally no benefit to anyone but the storyteller. They are either seen as more or less virtuous by their framing of the situation.
They have an interest in telling you a story that makes them look good and a greater interest in downplaying their guilt in the matter. At the end of the day it means very little to most observers.
Pair that with the absolute disincentive to provide actual specifics, the whole thing is moot to an honest person.
My take away from this link is not what Adafruit probably wants.
> we told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order
> that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_
You don't tell or demand another company do something with their own employees. There's more professional ways of dealing with a situation like this.
Request a meeting. Send a calm, collected, professional email to a decision-maker and be sure it's well sourced and factual. Keep things in private.
If the other party decides not to take action, then make a decision if you want to continue doing business with them. Do not keep pressuring them for the outcome you want, do not escalate the situation, and certainly don't drag the dirty laundry out into the public.
Like, what good did Adafruit actually think was going to come from getting into a fight with the founder of Sparkfun? 50 lashings with a wet noodle?
Whatever Sparkfun allegedly did to cause this, Adafruit looks pretty poor in this light. I've been a long time customer of both Adafruit and Sparkfun, and will continue to be - but this is some rookie, amateur, hot-headed behavior from Adafruit.
> You don't tell or demand another company do something with their own employees.
Depends what they did. Let's check the forum post…
> they had created and promoted hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment targeting limor, me, and others at adafruit. this was done on company time, shared, promoted.
Ok yeah if a company is sharing bigoted photoshops of my likeness, yes, I'm gonna demand that they discipline the responsible employees. Obviously.
I don't have any reference point for what "hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment [meriting HR training]" constitute, but if it's anywhere near as bad as it sounds, sure, escalate the situation and air your dirty laundry in public. This is unacceptable behaviour, and apparently it went on for years. When you're being publicly harassed, you have no duty to indefinitely restrain your response to private, polite emails.
It sounds like the allegations are for things that was be illegal in nature.
I think the expected way to handle something like this would be to write the calm factual email. If that goes nowhere then sue them. I don't think the public airing approach is the right one.
Suing is way more expensive and way more hostile than simply airing your grievances in public. And why not? That's what public forums are for. "Do nothing" and "sue them" are not your only options; we are part of a society, not merely party to a legal system.
It’s difficult to prosecute online harassment, and “hate sites and photoshopped images” aren’t illegal. There’s a right to freedom of speech in the US.
Slander is illegal, and while not exactly the same thing, there is a lot of overlap.
Depending on the nature of the site, there also might be rules around unfair competition that might be implicated.
There is a very high bar for slander in the US, especially for public figures.
Further the 'hate-' prefix in an accusation makes it one I immediately tune out.
It's just a manipulative word that lets you incite people while not actually revealing what was said.
They seem to have reported it in private and were then banned and publicly accused of Code of Conduct violations in retaliation. Going public with everything would seem to be the reasonable response.
Sure, but they did so by going to the Teensy forum, which is not a SparkFun site, and really made a stink. If going public is reasonable, they did it in the least reasonable way.
That’s not what I’m seeing. They requested comments from the public about the product, only mentioning that the fact that they weren’t allowed to purchase more from Sparkfun [0]. Sparkfun then jumped into the discussion with accusations of a Code of Conduct violation, and only then did they respond publicly. Sparkfun made it public first in that 3rd party forum.
[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
after a decade of dealing with the founder's bullying, i had enough, looking back almost every year there was something. we did handle things privately until it was clear nothing was going to change, the only real change is we cannot buy teensy, a closed source board sparkfun exclusively makes now, maybe they (sparkfun) will stop paying the payments on something that had to agreed to, and have, we'll see.
I understand you're pretty upset with the situation, and I can't blame you.
But I never should be reading about any of this on public forums. It doesn't reflect well on you or Adafruit.
Now an outcome has been chosen for you, without your input. The situation is probably irreconcilable.
That's not the position you ever want to be in. Obviously.
If the situation was untenable, after your reasonable and private attempts, you should have decided to sever ties on your terms. The outcome would have been the same, but you'd be in control of the situation, and wouldn't be permanently leaving things in public view.
I'm sorry for the situation. I'm a real hot head at times, but it's something I've learned (the hard way, over and over again) that I need to control. Business is business...
I hope it works out for you and Adafruit.
> Now an outcome has been chosen for you, without your input. The situation is probably irreconcilable.
I think you've reversed cause and effect. SparkFun publicly cut off Adafruit in response to Adafruit's private contact with SparkFun. Only then did Adafruit put out a public post addressing SparkFun's vague public allegations.
there was only one product we were purchasing anything in the hundreds of units, the teensy... we had a record sales today, inquires for a new board that is open source, so i think the community and customers have made decisions too.
The Teensy is so 2020 anyways. You want to skate where the puck is going.
You will want boards of the Kendryte K230 or SpacemitK3 (best value RISC-V chips) or Puya PY32 (best cheapest MCU, takes 5V!), and a STM32P1 linux board for good measure.
You must be misunderstanding: the public post you are linking is from the party you are not talking to, and was the first publicly published thing, which if I'm reading correctly, is the sin to you.
I completely disagree. Be yourself. And broadly, if you aspire to be in charge, as opposed to a forever IC, be yourself even more!
Adafruit makes an aesthetic experience that appeals to a niche audience. It is not an hockey stick growth company. And even those that are: Everybody makes aesthetic experiences. Nobody needs hobbyist microcontrollers.
Part of the product is being on the “right side” of Internet dramas.
If part of the product is "being on the right side of Internet drama", that kinda makes me trust them even less. A perverse incentive to get involved in stupid slapfights, escalate, and lie about it...
A private email isn't internet drama: you commenting on a disagreement you are not involved in, on the internet, is internet drama.
The person you are commenting on privately communicated, the public link you are reading is the other party.
I don't mean to be rude but given that I've seen several public statements about this "situation" from Paul dating back to Nov, I think you're commenting on a less complete dataset than I am.
I see: when you’re working with another company and someone’s a dick, you can’t mention it and give constructive suggestions on how to fix it, because then the suggestions are transmutated into an order. That means you are telling a company what it has to do to stop the bad thing, which is worse than the bad thing.
> it has to do to stop the bad thing, which is worse than the bad thing
Imo that “worse than the bad thing” evaluation is highly subjective. Nevertheless, I have to say I agree with the poster who recommends you cut ties on your own terms.
You don't tell or demand another company do something with their own employees. There's more professional ways of dealing with a situation like this.
Joyent's CEO once said he would have sacked another companies employee.
The fact that the Adafruit team continued that thread unabashedly after Paul Stoffregen's first reply is an awful look in my opinion. Doesn't seem like anyone here is behaving like adults.
Edit: I should clarify - Paul seems very much like a mature adult in all of this.
Wow, and it gets worse from there. I think Paul is smart to let Phil drag him on his own forum rather than let him go blow up on social media for getting banned.
still vague as hell lol
I need to see the photoshops!
My first thought was the same. I used to like Sparkfun but then they closed the source of some of their projects (while often "forgetting" to update their website to reflect that). I was concerned when I saw the headline but just assumed that Sparkfun was probably in the wrong even before I saw the comments.
Yeah just to add to this pile, I've always found Adafruit to be one of the most reasonable companies in the space. I've been buying their products for a decade.
Reppin my free coaster and keeb board. Reminds me of Hitec who would send candy with their transmitters.
Also all their docs man great for noobs like me starting out and libraries.
Same. I was afraid that there was some bad egg that managed to get into Adafruit, or maybe someone was having a real bad day. You never know what kind of person someone is off camera, but Adafruit as a company has always managed to give off the most wholesome vibes.
I'll be interested to see how this unfolds. I have little skin in the game being mostly upstream of the supply chain, but I've had reason to purchase from both companies, and hope this doesn't blow up into a huge thing.
That was my first thought as well, especially given the accusation of code of conduct violation. Not that I think that Adafruit is perfect no matter what, but I would have been shocked if this turned out to be true as stated.
Why is your "open source Teensy" [0] just an RP2350 on a Teensy shaped board?
In my book, what makes a Teensy a Teensy is 1) hardware support, like 600Mhz clock, CAN, FPU, RTC, other hardware peripherals which the RP2350 lacks and 2) software compatibility with Paul Stoffregen's well documented Teensyduino libraries. I would not buy something else if I needed these features.
Do you plan to do a port? Why not build around the same IMXRT1062? Are you barred from buying Paul's bootloader chips [1]?
[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
[1] https://www.pjrc.com/store/ic_mkl02_t4.html
hi, great question. we have to start with something and while the RP2350 is not going to beat a 600mhz m7 it is much less expensive, fast to get, has lots of nifty support libraries available, and will definitely do better than the teensy 3.2 which many folks loved so much (and was discontinued during the chip shortage). this is also a great time to add things that we always wanted in the teensy: SWD debug, built in 8 MB storage, lipoly battery charging, open source bootloader, open hardware design. stuff like CAN is supported via PIO (https://github.com/KevinOConnor/can2040), as is USB host on any two adjacent pins. M33 has FPU, and the dormant/RTC mode for the RP2350 is 10uA (see https://www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-pico/...). other 'teensiriffic' things like NeoPixel DMA support is well supported by PIO on the RP2350. as well as I2S audio.
as for the bootloader chip: we don't want to trade one closed-single-source component for another. if we're going to make something it should be fully open source as much as we can!
finally, for teensyduino libraries that you love: there's no reason they cant be ported (we did an audio port for the samd51) - which specific library are you referring to?
Thanks for the answer. I know many are scared off by the closed bootloader of the teensy (though I feel it's a fair thing to do). The lack of on-chip debugging is another shortcoming the Teensys have.
I've been working on an audio project recently, and the the ease of use and feature set that TeensyAudio has is incredible.
Teensy 4 does currently fill a pretty unique niche in terms of processing power though. There isn't much like it outside of professional eval boards.
> I know many are scared off by the closed bootloader of the teensy (though I feel it's a fair thing to do).
Why is it a fair thing to do?
It supports the developer by preventing blatant ripoffs of the Teensy.
Paul is one guy, and has put in a ton of effort writing high quality libraries for it. Most or all of them are open source. The main MCU is a commodity item. Only the bootloader chip is closed source.
If you want to rip off the Teensy, you can use the same MCU but you'll need to come up with your own bootloading process (Adafruit could do this if they wanted to). It wouldn't be that difficult but is enough of a barrier to stop casual cloning. Seeing as how Amazon and Aliexpress are filled with cheap Arduino clones but not Teensys, it seems to have gone well so far. Nobody wants to be undercut so easily by someone who has no intention of contributing back.
Supporting free and open source technology means supporting whoever can get it in as many hands as possible as cheaply as possible while paying your employees fairly. Adafruit gets this.
Making anything proprietary at this point for use in DIY software or hardware projects just makes me roll my eyes and hold my money for the day the open clones come. I have been saddened by dead open hardware projects because old versions of Teensy they were built around are no longer produced.
I will never buy a Teensy, but I look forward to buying the Freensy.
Sparkfun blew it by making the Teensy partially closed and so Teensy will be irrelevant. LibreOffice, OpenTofu, MariaDB etc. The most open solution always wins in the end. It is why I buy Prusa over Bambu, and why I pick Adafruit over Sparkfun.
My own companies likewise freely OSI license everything we do to the public no matter what the profit minded folks in our universe have to say. I -love- when people compete with us using our own work. If you can make a budget version of what we invent for people that cannot afford a bit extra to support us, wonderful. That is success for us as a creators that want to maximize impact.
If you cannot afford our prices, by all means buy from a competitor and contribute to the ecosystem that our customers benefit from anyway. That is why we will never spend a second of our engineering time creating or promoting proprietary technology because all the skills we have are because others shared their work with us.
I honestly take a lot of inspiration from companies like Adafruit as a leader of my own orgs.
> Teensy 4 does currently fill a pretty unique niche in terms of processing power though. There isn't much like it outside of professional eval boards.
If I want that much performance, maybe I should think about a Pocketbeagle 2. And almost every embedded MCU these days is sprouting an on-chip "AI" extension ;).
Right, but you're not really competing on processor speed. You're competing on maturity of peripherals where the RP doesn't really match up PIO or not.
Edit: I see you're comparing it to the 3.2 but I suspect most folks are going to be comparing your offering to the 4.x.
Yeah - I don't really consider this comparable for my uses which rely heavily on the DSP and processing power of the Teensy itself either.
Drama and whatnot aside I'm not really sure why anyone would buy the (considerably more expensive) Teensy over something RP based if RP was suitable for their needs already.
Interestingly despite being a Teensy fan I have found myself reaching more towards the RP when I can because I can't stand the Arduino API and much prefer the RP SDK. I do use Teensy without Teensyduino (Makefile based) and also a bit of the CMSIS-DSP stuff directly - but it's kinda clunky IMO.
I've been interested to hear more about use cases for these "hybrid" MCUs, can you share a bit about why you chose that over something like a Cortex-A running linux, or an SoC with -A and -M cores?
It's a good question - unfortunately I don't really have a good answer...
Almost all of my embedded activities are for a my own hobby purposes, and I just like the ability to go 'as low as I can' with projects on MCUs. It's nice to be able to use the device's peripherals as much as possible (hardware DSP etc) and I'm not confident in how I'd do that on a Linux based system. I'm in to building my own ham radio Software Defined receivers and it's nice to keep it completely real time.
If I were to be doing this stuff professionally (and I am very close to people who do at work) then yeah I'd probably be using Zephyr or something.
Ah interesting! I work on (very expensive) SDRs and we make pretty heavy use of Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale SoCs. They combine Cortex-A, Cortex-R, and FPGA fabric all in one package, with some fancy interconnects. So you can handle the hard realtime stuff on an RTOS or in the FPGA, then send the data over to the application processor with a hard float ALU to crunch some numbers (or build some kind of dsp IP into the FPGA, idk much about that side of it).
I've also seen some cool stuff with the BeagleBone products, which have a few TI custom architecture DSPs and "realtime units" which you can communicate with via Linux.
But yeah, I can certainly see how just doing it all on a super fast MCU could be easier and cheaper without the backing of commercial enterprises.
I've always thought it would be cool to design a "poor man's zynq" hat for a SBC. Stick a RP3050 and a Lattice FPGA on there and set up some SPI / UART connections.
it will have benefits over the 4.x - we can always spin up a version with the iMX chipset (we have a metro board with the little sister chip, iMX RT1011 already in stock) - tbh if we did something with the iMX RT106x we'd probably start with a Metro (Arduino-shield compatible) or Feather board since that's a super-popular pinout.
either way, more hardware is better and we don't want to just give people the same-old-same-old... as we mentioned there's lots of things that we can add to make the board useful to people: SWD, USB C, Lipoly batt, onboard storage, neopixel LED, etc). what peripheral/library are you specifically concerned about?
Mostly I'm just leery of software defined peripherals being at the mercy of whatever community springs up around them, nothing specific. In terms of a Metro then yeah, something to slot in where the Due was absolutely with high speed USB, 10/100 ethernet, CAN FD, and all that jazz that wouldn't work on a $10 board. A SAMV70 successor to the Due?
NXP just seems antithetical to an open platform. Then again Arduino went with Renesas, and they're… not great.
Otherwise it's the openness that would pique my interest. SWD headers, yes 100%. But also the documentation. No half-assed SVDs, buggy closed source flash algorithms (Microchip), wholly undocumented peripherals (looking at you Renesas), stuff like that.
All chip manufacturers are alike in this respect, unfortunately. That whole industry believes that they thrive on secrecy and that simply properly speccing their hardware would already be a massive competitive risk.
Nah, it's a spectrum. Companies like NXP and Infineon are at one end. NXP wants a ton of personal information to access even the most basic docs on some of its chips, sometimes even an NDA. Infineon won't even acknowledge you for the most part.
Companies like STM, RP, and TI are at the other end. STM got super popular because they're cheap and the documentation is incredibly easy to get at. I think RP is following suit.
Renesas puts out some documentation, but it's really rough. Anything that has even a whiff of crypto is completely undocumented. They're also squatting on a few Rust crates where Espressif actually hired a Rust developer to work on their Rust HAL. The most comical thing is that while they version their reference manual they don't seem to update it and instead issue a ton of broad errata that apply to multiple manuals.
Before the acquisition Atmel's documentation was well written and organized.
Agreed. I will say that Renesas does have one thing going for them, being Japanese it has the lowest supply chain/geopolitical risk right now of anybody other than TI. And the Microchip/Atmel low end stuff is so overpriced/outdated, that you're be better off stockpiling reels of the 8 cent Puya chips or going with the the TI MSPM0.
That's fair. Even so, the majority of the companies whose chips I would consider for specialized electronics seem to be so far down on the paranoid spectrum that it hinders their business.
Sure, some do, but some are coming around and some were never there. Which is why it's important for a company like Adafruit to pick a manufacturer that is towards the open end of the spectrum. Unfortunately NXP isn't that manufacturer even if their silicon is more powerful.
If you replace the Teensy 4.x it would have to be something very close to the same pinout, foot print, cost and features otherwise it would just be a new product. Ideally you would find a way to source the Teensy directly bypassing Sparkfun.
sparkfun is the single source supplier (and now maker of the product).
Yes, obviously, but they don't make the chips, so can't you just source the exact same chip, make thing pin compatible and call it a day? Then you'd have a drop in replacement, any changes you make will cause disruption for people downstream.
https://www.nxp.com/part/MIMXRT1062DVL6A
Spinning an IMXRT1062/IMXRT1064 design sans the terrible Teensy bootloader should take a day or two at most.
These chips have perfectly-fine ROM USB bootloaders and SWD, don't ruin them by adding extra garbage.
The layout of the Teensy 4.x was challenging as I recall with the speeds involved. But maybe you are a demigod of compact high clock designs.
Nothing on that board is remotely high speed or challenging.
USB HS on a board that small is a non issue: it's one measly differential pair with easy impedance requirements.
Go ahead and make one then, we'll be thankful.
There is a place for a cheaper 5v tolerant microcontroller, but that’s more of a commodity space and probably not worth competing in for most.
I have projects that can equally use either a Teensy or a few different Feather boards, and frankly the Feather boards are always the prefferred option beacause:
* assymetrical footprint - the assymmetrical dip footprint means the board has polarity protection. I have hat/receiver boards with zig-zag stagger dip rows that work as free componentless sockets to receive a feather board with pins soldered. The Feather versions are far more convenient and safe since they can't be plugged in any way but the correct way.
* The Feather standard being a standard - ecosystem of compatible boards with compatible footprint & pinout at least for main functions.
* lipo charging circuit and jst plug, the automatic ups functionality, usb charging, removable/replaceable via standard plug
* off-board power on/off - I very much make use of the trick Feather has where a hat can turn the mcu board on/off without being the source of power to the mcu board.
* Perhaps a small detail but Feathers with sd card slots have the card sense pin wired up to a gpio pin while the teensy's do not. On Feather I can have a hardware interrupt fire when a card is inserted or ejected, and I can't do that on Teensy.
* keeping all parts on the top surface - there are other mcu dev boards with some similar functions but they are less convenient to use as a module in a project since they may have buttons, jst plug, sd card slot, or other stuff on both sides of the board, which makes them inaccessible when mounted onto some other pcb.
Teensy has a few points in their favor too but I really value these facets of most Feather boards.
I think this is a bit tone-deaf the reason why the teensy is so desirable is because of its raw power in such a neat package. The RP2350 is great but if I wanted that I would just purchase it rather than the Freensy
I for one abandoned the Teensy for all projects once I realized it was closed as I have no interest in promoting or teaching closed hardware and software in my personal DIY time.
I will gladly be a customer of your open hardware replacements.
That’s all well and good but it simply doesn’t make it an open source teensy.
> hardware support, like 600Mhz clock, CAN, FPU, RTC, other hardware peripherals which the RP2350 lacks
FWIW, those are all NXP-provided features on the chip, not something Sparkfun has any particular connection with. There are other iMX devices on the market, just not in this form factor. And there are other vendors with SoCs offering similar performance.
Really one of the biggest problems in this market is that everyone is putting the abstractions in the wrong place. We've all collectively decided that this stuff is scary and we need comforting IDEs and hardware uniformity to deal with it.
But... portable software and frameworks are hardly new ideas. Come over to Zephyr and see all the stuff you can run on boards from basically everyone, including NXP.
There's a lot more great hardware for your project than just Teensy, so stop locking yourself in.
It looks like it's just a set of bullet points on a forum thread, not anything like a final design, so go post that comment there.
Oh boy, just what we need. Drama between open hardware vendors. Neither of these responses feels like the complete story to me. I hope there's a path forward to heal this rift in one way or another. Both SparkFun and Adafruit are doing amazing things for the community and I would love to see both continue to thrive.
Note that Sparkfun has been less and less of an "open hardware" vendor, as they've dropped the open aspect on some of their most popular projects.
Seems to be the inevitable trend... Just in recent times: Pebble drama, Arduino joining the dark side, now Sparkfun & Adafruit. End of an era
we are sticking with open source, arduino has moved away from that and sparkfun has an open-source certification revoked due to not being open source.
What's the drama with Pebble? I thought everything was rosy since the reboot?
There was conflict between the new (old) hardware manufacturer Core Devices, and the Rebble community that's maintained the app store and software for the original Pebbles. I think they've worked it out, but it got ugly for a bit.
> Arduino joining the dark side
What happened?
Now owned by Qualcomm, not exactly know for their open source friendly attitude.
Do you have a response/explanation for the two specific accusations about forwarding inappropriate emails to sparkfun employees, and involving a customer with something?
Those seem extremely vague, but I didn't see them mentioned in the blog post.
It would be deeply funny if SparkFun was referring to Adafruit forwarding inappropriate emails written by SparkFun employees to SparkFun, in an attempt to report their harassment.
That is exactly how I understand it at the moment. And depending on the material, it would be a somewhat valid complaint, if the report included the material without prior warning. Though, not valid enough to call CoC on this, IMHO.
It would only be at all valid if it was forwarded to employees who weren’t in a customer facing role.
Saying that you’re required to give a content warning to an account manager for material related to your business relationship puts the burden of responsibility onto the victim. Dealing with the psychological impact is the responsibility of their employer, not the customer.
No, even in a customer-facing role, you won't have to put up with every s**. I mean, it's a business for electronics, not a porn-shop or moderation for explicit material at some social media-platform. There should be a line on what they have to tolerate.
And the test is “did it come from my employer to a customer I am responsible for?”
From the little we know the "material" in question would be photoshops made to harass Limor, made by someone at sparkfun. So it would be weird for sparkfun to complain , given the content originated with one of their employees. (Allegedly)
Yeah this is how I read it as well.
>so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters..
one corporate side overshares by pointing fingers and accusing a different corporation...
so that corporation decides to be the better person, declare the opponent as weirdos, then proceed to point fingers at individuals instead for collective action from the public.
nice look, both groups.
Adafruit is in the wrong for not advocating for collective action from the public? I do not understand what exactly your argument is there.
This is the tiny corporate version of a teenage girl posting a long content free rant about being betrayed by friends.
All I see is bickering children and I like both less as a result. I don't really care who is more right.
>betrayed
This is the big deal. Don't think of it as petty. From nations to individuals, betrayal destroys built trust and changes the landscape. Even Kissinger admits that Trust can maintain an anarchic/international order until the trust is broken.
This is why I'm am a realist, power is more important than Trust, and when you need Trust, use verification mechanisms. This idea is technically an 'Information Hazard' because it causes arms races and costs everyone more resources.
Uh, I'm saying these people are acting with the emotional maturity of children.
You might be right that it seems like world politics but only in the way that world politics are very often driven by people with the emotional development, ego, and maturity of 12 year olds.
Yeah if it were me I'd just stop selling the stuff. You don't a justification to choose your partners.
Have you also been embargoed from buying shift keys?
I laughed way too hard at this. Also, I can't even read some of these statements with a straight face because all the project and company names sound completely ridiculous when placed in serious sentences, it's like reading about embezzlement charges for Sesame Street characters.
I needed a good laugh today and "reading about embezzlement charges for Sesame Street characters" gave me it, so: thanks!
Levar Burton did get into some hot water over the Reading Rainbow app.
Hah, really? He's a treasure, met him a few times at poetry readings and such. A quick search isn't bringing anything up but google has been failing me a lot lately. Or I'm failing at google a lot lately.
Or Google is failing you lately. Seems like it's not a recent event, which Google is also REALLY bad at these days.
https://current.org/2016/03/wned-and-rrkidz-trade-lawsuits-o...
speech to text, with a newborn, replying to these and feeding her. i cannot purchase shift keys if they are on sparkfun, yes.
Adafruit is maybe an all time amazing success story built on giving more of a shit than anyone else. There is a direct through line from reading MAKE in high school through programming the 8 LED POV thing through the rest of my career. Limor doesn't answer a forum question on a Sunday morning in like 2008 and I don't make my mortgage payment this month and my son gets store brand formula. I wish you every success professionally and in this new chapter with your tiny miracle, and I hope for an amicable resolution to this whole Sparkfun thing.
Weird that your STT doesn't handle capitals, but that's a good excuse. Sounds like you're having a challenging day, I hope my snarky joke wasn't too annoying.
The problem is not STT or feeding the baby. All his emails lack capitalization. E.g: https://gist.github.com/NPoole/d9aab9dfa2a18f4141039f7ce3505...
> I hope my snarky joke wasn't too annoying
Don't worry, he always writes like this.
I think it's a trend among tech founders, I've seen some on Twitter doing it, and then a bunch of hanger-ons copying the behavior.
I think it goes back a lot further than Twitter.
As someone who hung out on IRC way back in the 1990s (and internet-knew Limor from Adafruit back before her handle was Ladyada) I associate this writing style with the culture of a lot of the hacker-related IRC channels I used to hang out in back then.
Some of the same people from that era did in fact turn out to be tech founders and maybe that's how it got carried over into the Twitter-verse, but it predates that.
Corroborating. It goes way back to the early 90s IRC and MUD cultures, from which many of us sprung. Limor came to the scene a bit later, but the culture was well-established.
Most of us would code shift when writing in other milieux, some weaned ourselves off the habit when our work started interfacing with nonreceptive readers, and a few retained the affectation to make a statement (or an anti-statement!).
It's amusing to see the style resurface in a new generation though. I guess it's no more odd than when 20 year olds unknowingly emulate the dress and mannerisms from when their parents were young. We just smile and recall the age when we thought we were being different too. :)
> Limor came to the scene a bit later
Not much later, I remember her hanging out in #hack in the '92-93 timeframe (first as lem0n then later as ladyada).
She was like the "kid" of the channel regulars (which is an extremely relative designation because there were a lot of teenagers just a couple years older than her).
I also remember her going to one of the 2600 meetings at the CambridgeSide Galleria that I went to with morgen and wil wheaton that must have been either in 1993 or very early 1994 (it was definitely prior to the first HOPE in 94). IIRC Limor was being chaperoned by RogueAgent and theora/Sarah Gordon.
Sounds right. I was only an occasional attendee at the Galleria, but the timeline makes sense.
H.O.P.E. brings back memories though -- I was very uncertain that that Poland Springs jug would contain the explosives taped to the Clipper chip. I remember wishing I was sitting several rows further back for that moment. :)
> early 90s IRC and MUD cultures
It goes back before that. There were well known Usenet folks who adhered to the style. The 1970s-and-earlier Arpanet was before my time, but I'm sure it existed then too ;).
You know, I was trying to remember if anyone from Usenet did similarly, but I couldn't think of anyone.
I was a bit post-Great Renaming into well post-Eternal September. And we may have followed different groups.
The style arises spontaneously in isolated individuals and groups of course (at least since e. e. cummings!), but it was pervasive-to-universal on IRC and MUDs.
I do wonder how it trickled into there though. The most boring answer is probably the correct one. it was slightly easier to type and kids are naturally flexible.
I wrote in lower case on Usenet before the renaming.
So there's one.
I think I did too, but it may have varied by newsgroup, and I wasn't particularly prolific.
I'm not sure whether I'm brave enough to search the archives for my own writing. :)
You whippersnappers!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. It’s like watching a discussion about who invented orcs, Terry Brooks or Terry Pratchett.
I don't mean to imply invention, just community ubiquity.
Obviously e.e. is the o.g. :)
Explanation: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
You’re right. Sam Altman does this and others repeat it like people used to wear black turtlenecks.
Not just tech founders. Jeffrey Epstein writing is just atrocious. Like how does anyone habitually use a commas ,, like this?
I've heard it referred to as a "flex," basically doing something stupid to rub it in that you can get away with it.
I took that as an indicator that the person was using an on-screen phone keyboard.
"Dictated but not read"
Congratulations! (assuming you're the parent)
If not, congratulations on the heist.
Perhaps a foot pedal? Maybe Adafruit could make one.
What?
Your other posts have capital letters for technical abbreviations and "Sparkfun", but not for "I" and the first letter of sentences.
Sorry, from a bystander this looks like a straight-up lie, and why lie about such a small thing? It brings into question the truth of your other statements. Just say you like the style if that's the truth.
some are already words/abbreivations that are in my word list and some are me typing over later when i can, and some is a cut/paste if limor has something for me to add or does an edit as she looks at things. you can see my writings on the adafruit blog have caps, commenting on forums or hackersnews quickly, there will be some things someone does not like. we were at the doc with our 2 month old during this ... https://x.com/ptorrone/status/2011509017814659095
Congrats! It's insane to me that you'd have to defend any of this. I hope the visit went well.
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Let me inform you (and anyone else for that matter) that one observer has observed 2 samples of writing today, yours and his, and has formed 2 impressions of the writers, and that yours is not the more favorable. Do with this information what you will.
valuing style over substance is folly.
It is clearly a deliberate choice to send the signal of conforming to a particular type of non-conformance. It’s a costly signal because most people will see it as having the emotional maturity of a child, it signals to others that given their social status they can afford that self imposed handicap.
It's rarely the mature who talk about maturity.
years and years and years of ptorrone's posts aren't capitalized, though. it's not like they suddenly decided today, for the purposes of this post, to change their writing style.
in any case, i prefer to decide whether someone has the "emotional maturity of a child" based on what they say, not whether they push their shift key.
Perhaps but in this case the style does make it harder to read the substance.
*poorly written prose
Typing in all lowercase makes you look more vulnerable, it's a pretty common rhetorical tactic in PR.
I had never noticed this before. Can you point at any examples?
I have long noticed high profile people going to court with some kind of cast on, though.
I heard that altman does it. I don't care about him enough to check though. More silly gimmicks like holmes talking in a mans voice or jobs wearing the same turtle neck
Agree, it makes it seem like the individual is "one of us" and that what they're saying is a little more raw/genuine.
"They're being mean to me." vs "theyre being mean to me".
Uh, no, it makes you look careless and unprofessional.
How it's perceived is no doubt in the eye of the beholder. I can totally see how some people would associate this writing style with children, and so associate it with "vulnerable".
I have no idea what any of this thread is about, but I'm sure the thing that I'm going to remember next time I need to buy something from one of these two is that one of them can be bothered to use capital letters, so I'll use them.
some of us are anti-capitalist
I was going to ask more about your philosophy, but after collapsing all of the other replies, I got to see what you were replying to.
I fear the page formatting caused an entirely respectable joke to be lost to many people
This whole thread is utterly ridiculous. I can't take anyone seriously who is sitting here saying they can't take someone else seriously over this, or even saying anything at all about it as though it were the tiniest bit significant.
It's like Vance on Zelensky's clothes. Exhibiting high ignorance and triviality while in the very act of presuming to accuse someone else of being unserious.
@ptorrone, the forum drama is hard to follow, and maybe a little upset or sleep-deprived.
The blog post is OK (though maybe consider dropping the "We were informed...", and the addendum about "trying to drag"), but doesn't explain the forum drama about context.
In a skim of the forum, I saw only insufficient references to a context of problems and maybe improper behavior, scattered around. I couldn't get a good read on the context, after trying for longer than I think most people will.
If the company would like to explain more about the context, would it make sense to take a deep breath, and sit down with a PR advisor or lawyer, to figure out exactly what you want to say, and how? Do it very carefully, so you only have to do it once?
Or would the company like to drop the matter of that context, and move on, even though that would leave the confusing forum messages?
(Disclosure: Limor is a friend from our earlier hacker/MIT days, but I've not discussed this matter with her.)
I am a lifelong Sparkfun and Adafruit customer, I grew up and went to engineering school just down the street from Sparkfun.
This event will cause me to no longer be a Sparkfun customer.
There is no one that I have more respect for in this world than limor. She has done more for this industry, education and open source than anyone alive.
there would be no limor without nate. fact.
That is a ridiculous statement.
without Sparkfun, whose catalog could they have scraped?
Without Sparkfun developing the business model for them to copy, where would they be?
You mean the radio shack business model?
The Heathkit business model?
The Eico business model?
Jameco? Digikey?
you wouldn't know of them if they had emulated any of those.
That makes his conduct is even worse
Appreciate the transparency! The one thing that doesn't quite add up for me is SparkFun accusing you of "involving a SparkFun customer" in the dispute. Can you comment on what that might be referring to?
probably mentioning on PJRC's forum they're making their own teensy compatible because sparkfun(Under contract by PJRC as the exclusive teensy manufacturer) cut them off.
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
This needs a response, and my opinion will certainly be up in the air until I hear an explanation (or lack thereof) from AdaFruit.
> We are now working on an open-source, Teensy-compatible board.
Yeah, right; the PCB art work looks in rather an advanced state of completion that has been in the works for a while due to the proverbial writing being on the wall.
More like, we have now given a brighter green light to our ongoing in-house project to eliminate the supply risk coming from Sparkfun, now that the shit has hit the fan ...
Glad to hear that there will by an open source option. This honestly makes the Teensy/Freensy an option for me where before it wasn't.
Is there any thought to expanding the Freensy lineup beyond a pure clone?
What’s the deal with 5v, 3.3v and 24v “standards” for sensors? It seems like there are really three different markets and it sucks because crossing “lanes” is really annoying. I like how you all made the qwik connectors “just work”, but now that I’m trying more industrial stuff I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get my 24v world to play nicely with the 3.3v world but of course my 24v world only wants to do SPI over 5v.
Anyhoo, sorry we can’t just stick to the technical drama.
Those levels are based on the electronics themselves. Earlier circuits used TTL which needed higher voltages to signify a "High". Newer CMOS based electronics need less voltage.
Lower voltages help with power savings. Higher voltages can and do work better in high power, high noise environments though! 24V as you see is still very popular and useful inany applications.
> What’s the deal with 5v, 3.3v and 24v “standards” for sensors?
Historical garbage and different manufacturing technologies. Be happy if you can get away with only 5V and 3V3 rails in your project. 24V is usually to interface with industrial sensors. And sometimes you see 12V as well, for stuff that's RS232 based.
And on top of that you got a fifth standard, 4..20 mA current loops. That one is used for long range transmission of analog values of a single sensor per wire pair, with 4-20 mA being seen as the value (4 mA = 0%, 20 mA = 100%), and anything less being seen as a cable break, anything higher as a short circuit somewhere.
4 to 20mA signaling is only the start of a very specific rabbit hole. Someone had the brilliant idea to encode digital signals on top of the analog current loop. The result is the HART communication protocol, which is old, bloated, confusing, quirky - and it is really popular in industrial automation.
Those voltage standards are kind of meant for very local things. If you really get into industrial things, one should look to industrial standards that work over longer distances. That is things like RS422, RS485, and increasingly industrial versions of ethernet that use differential signals. One should also learn what a PLC is and understand that in an industrial context, implementing controls in an Arduino or rpi is probably reinventing the wheel to achieve less reliability than industry standards.
4 to 20mA sensors are great. Invented in the 50s (!) to replace pneumatic controls and to this day work great. iirc they are usually 24V these days. You missed an important detail; the first 4mA (96mW) powers the sensor/local microcontroller (no local power supply required), and the remaining 4-20mA gives a calibrated current output for voltage/pressure/whatever you are measuring. If the output is less than 4mA or more than 20mA you know something is wrong (and many devices will output 20.1, 20.2 etc currents as a kind of fault code).
don't forget 0-10v and 2-10v analog signals.
Never used 2-10V but I learned about 0-10V when someone approached me to design a device to input 0-10V position signal and output two phase-shifted sinusoids to retrofit to a controller that only took resolver inputs. We shipped a couple dozen of them to repair broken machine tools. Fun project, but not going to get rich from it!
I'm guessing that the 2-10V is to detect line break conditions?
Ah yes, I was wondering why my ClearCore supported that, seemed oddly specific!
At least going between 3.3 and 5 Volts, they depend on the fab process used to make the chip. Fab capacity is more widely available for the lower voltages, making it inconvenient to keep supplying higher voltage chips. It has also gotten easier to do high performance analog at lower voltages.
Yeah, it's a pain. Many of my boards have both 3.3 and 5 Volt rails. There are quite a number of level-shifting logic buffers, for instance that are powered by 3.3 but accept 5-V inputs with no penalty.
For hobbyist type stuff, a 3.3 V CMOS chip will accept a 5 V logic signal if you feed it through a series resistor, since the built-in protection diodes of the CMOS chip will clamp the voltage. Don't let the engineers catch you doing it. ;-) But I often use a series resistor to provide a little bit of overload protection to a CMOS input.
Little or no logic ever operated at 24 V, other than relays. There's always some level translation needed there. The higher voltage follows the same rule as electric transmission lines: Correspondingly lower current allows for thinner wire, of importance if you're driving something like a solenoid valve.
So back in the day ducks under thrown bottles and tomatoes we had the standard 4000 series on 3V-18V and life was grand. The CMOS chips, less grand.
Then we had the 7400 series around then too, and boy howdy did that product line proliferate. The BJT TTL families got in so many things, but it demanded Vcc of 5V +-5% and I think it is safe to say anything expected to work with those chips standardized on 5V. Great, everyone is agre— ah.
74C is a CMOS line that happily uses 3V-15V. Ok, we can ignore that one it's just a... Nevermind, 74HC and friends do 2V-6V, neat. But it still works with the 5V so we're great.
So, CMOS got better, we got gates down to 3V or less with competitive propagation timing, and it turns out that less power use is good for clocking, but we can't actually feed anything 3V because of voltage drop so it's 10% higher cause... someone figured that was a nice round number or something? As for why it keeps dropping... Thinner conductor channels, thinner insulation, you do the math. Yes, power consumption with more gates is a reason too, but I'm pinning the biggest blame badge on decreasing sizes in the process nodes.
Oh, you know all that already and want to know about just the sensor/interconnect split? My bad. Line drop, afaik. 3.3V signalling is fine on a PCB or when your wires are short. Want to move your sensors further away? Maybe 5V will be a tad more reliable. That sensor over 20m away? Sure, 24V sounds appealing. I don't know the exact lengths where voltage drop on the wiring is enough to cause issues but I'm pretty sure that kind of reasoning in why it persists beyond simple logic compatibility.
As a secondary concern of the same form, non-differential protocols are voltages you have knowledge and control of, the various kinds of line noise less so. A data line offset by a volt is more problematic at 3.3V than 24V
Oh and if I'm driving a small industrial motor or actuator, or a 400V rated relay, I definitely want to be doing so with more enthusiasm than 5V signifies. I also want less enthusiasm than electrocution cause I touched a logic line. 24V will (just about) generally not give you a meaningful shock unless you try to lick it.
great question! so historically microcontrollers (and sensors) were 5V 'CMOS' power and logic. this was way better than the up-to-12V for TTL logic but over time the desire for higher clock speeds / faster IO / lower power means the voltage needs to drop (since power = current * voltage lower voltage is lower power) the next voltage standard became 3.3V. these days, even 3.3V is a 'bit high' and we're seeing lots of device that are 1.8V or 1.65V or even 1.2V max (yeek!) one thing we do for all of our sensor breakouts is add level shifting up/down as necessary so they work with EITHER 5V older boards (yay no need to throw them out!) or with the newer 3.3V boards (woo forward compatibility) level shifting and regulation also reduces the risk of damage from over/under volting or plugging stuff in backwards. this is documented here: https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-adafruit-stemma-qt/st...
maybe someone from sparkfun could post advice for you here too...
Ooh thank you! I often forget that everything is a capacitor/resistor/inductor all at once and i see how at higher frequencies that starts to matter! I think the 24v stuff is also more low frequency signaling over longer distances so rise/fall time is less of a worry but voltage drop / noise is perhaps more of one. Thanks!
Fwiw, I’m team adafruit on this. Hope it works out for y’all
No questions. Just move on. Engaging in public spectacle isn't a good look for anyone.
That's normally good advice, but this is a small enough niche that trust-in-brand matters a great deal. Right now AdaFruit is looking like the villain here. I think a little more transparency from them is a very good thing if they don't want to suffer massive brand damage.
Definitely avoid ad hominems, and focus purely on facts. Provide what information/evidence you can without violating agreements, but only if it's relevant to the situation and includes as much context as possible.
No in this case addressing the accusation is necessary.
I think what's currently been said is sufficient. You need to make a grown up version of the statement "None of that is true", but yes probably best to leave it at that.
Honestly, this being Adafruit, my default assumption is to believe them. Especially with this super vague "please read between the lines because if I actually say something false it'll be libel" accusation.
Wouldn't be the first time CoC was used as a lame attempt to harm open source.
Thanks for speaking up.
I find it weird to jump to this from the scarce information we have.
"Someone did a CoC violation" is just a way for an org to say "someone was an asshole to such an extent it was driving other people away or getting us into legal trouble", with the manner of assholery defined in the CoC. 9/10 times it is nothing sinister.
Of course right now we just don't know what happened.
The one thing I know is that for threads such as this one it is best to ignore all of the stuff from accounts made just for the purpose of participating in the thread.
In this case, given the topic of this thread is targeted harassment in response to public social media criticism, I think it's understandable that some folks might like to participate anonymously to avoid becoming a future target.
You are by far the least subtle sock puppet account.
Nonsense, if you feel strongly about the subject comment in your main account. Otherwise this is just taken as "oh the guys are arguing through side accounts now".
Also this is not some russian mafia drug deal gone wrong, it's nerds disagreeing on the internet.
> "Someone did a CoC violation" is just a way for an org to say "someone was an asshole [...]"
Not even that, since so many CoCs are vague enough that someone unprincipled wielding them could be using them for petty interpersonal disputes. Unless I already have reason to trust the accuser, when I see "CoC violation" it tells me there's drama but it doesn't tell me who the asshole is.
> I find it weird to jump to this from the scarce information we have.
If you look at how I worded my comment, you'll see I didn't jump to any conclusion. Only you have, apparently.
(edit: Also unsurprising to see your account is two days old)
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Are you HR or something?
Nah but I recognize that HR, unfortunately, has to exist for larger organizations.
Unless you have an infinitely wise and patient dictator who can just say "you're an asshole, you go" and always make the right call or something.
Overall I think Code of Conducts are a net negative. Alleged violations of them seem to be used to lend credibility to actions that otherwise would be hard(er) to justify.
Overall I wish we lived in a world where they are not needed. But in every community, some people are assholes so they are often needed.
Communities were doing just fine without a CoC up until they became a trend. People got banned too but the moderators couldn't hide behind a CoC to justify questionable decisions.
Communities were not doing fine. CoC didn't come out of nowhere because someone was bored. Having a CoC doesn't absolve moderators any more than having laws absolves judges from having to make good rulings.
I've been part of a lot of communities and never have I felt that a CoC was missing or needed. CoCs didn't come because they were needed but because of a social justice fad. Have a look at the Tim Peters incident with the Python community. The decision to suspend him, a core maintainer (he wrote the Zen of Python), was justified by made-up absurd alleged CoC violations. Without a CoC they couldn't have suspended him as easily without totally losing their face.
> Communities were doing just fine without a CoC
I mean kinda, but also not. CoCs just codify what the moderators think.
Even Hacker news has a CoC: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html its just called a guide.
A community has to have a set of rules which most people agree on. One of the most common attacks in a moderated forum is "Oh but X did Y" and "thats not fair X can do it"
A CoC can be a simple way to "tap the sign" when someone is being a dick.
It also allows communities to set expectations at the start, not after someone has transgressed and pissed in the well.
In an ideal world, you'd just have a thing that says "don't be a dick" but that doesn't work for many and hilarious reasons. Engineers who who either have a god complex, parsing issues or empathy gaps (either learnt or inherent ) are notoriously difficult as a community to keep from getting into frothy arguments that colour everything and give off a bad smell.
CoCs are a tool, that can sometimes help.
I perceive "guidelines" or "rules" having a very different connotation compared to a "code of conduct."
See for, example, the SQLite team adopting the Rule of St. Benedict as their "Code of Conduct," getting criticized for it, and changing it to a "Code of Ethics" in accordance with the Rule about seeking accommodation with your adversaries.
Note also that Hipp pretty much just let any criticism for that wash over him and, from all public appearances, stayed cool and just kept working on his stuff while the loudmouths got bored and found other people to bother.
Goes to show that drama is a choice.
It just means you get different kinds of assholes who are better at navigating around the CoC or even weaponizing it.
Yes but it was always this way. Any organisation with rules can suffer from rules lawyers as a lot of people who have tried to contribute to wilipedia/serve on a committee of a voluntary organisation etc will testify.
I would say incorrect. All that is true is that something is needed, but there is nothing about the problem that requires that particular poor framework for dealing with it.
It just dawned on me that CoC docs are basically HR for open source. Point to a violation and voila, that person is gone. “Sorry, nothing personal, CoC violation, there’s nothing I can do”.
Exactly. Without a CoC the persons making hard decisions have to stand behind them. With a CoC they can hide behind the CoC and wash their hands in innocence. This lowers the barrier for making questionable decisions and overall decreases honesty. We've seen this with the suspension of Python core maintainer Tim Peters.
I had never heard of the Tim Peters incident, but I just googled it. (It's not on his Wikipedia page.)
I found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1ep4dbt/the_shamefu...
Which points to this:
https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...
This characterizes it as completely unfair, and the /r/python community seems to agree.
Is there a rebuttal from the other side?
Wow, I somehow missed all that. That's horrendous. I've always felt that a code of conduct is a tool for bureaucrats to hide behind, and episode doesn't alter my view. Thanks for sharing.
Honestly, this is the first argument against CoCs I've seen that I agree with. They do kinda act as a tool to deflect responsibility.
There are bad CoCs and ways to abuse them and people who do. That doesn't mean the concept of setting social expectations for a collaborative project is inherently bad. Same as for discussion forum guidelines and moderation.
No CoC is better than a bad CoC or one where interpretation is centralized to someone with an agenda. But many times a decent CoC can help newcomers in reading the room and support well-intended moderators in making judgement calls.
I also think good CoCs are small and mostly reactive. It's premature social engineering to spend energy on formulating general policies for things that happened once or twice if ever for the project.
Like, maybe wait until you actually had a couple of slop PRs before spending time, energy, and political capital on an AI contribution policy.
This is like saying "overall laws are bad" because whoever is applying them is doing so maliciously. Even in the absence of COC companies like this always find a way to justify this sort of pressure. If not a COC, it's a TOS or NDA or whatever document acronym you can find.
Nobody would accept the rule of law if we didn't all know the alternative was the local bullies with the most friends and guns declaring themselves warlords and selling your family into slavery.
An open source project without a CoC on the other hand is quite normal and harmless. Maybe some people sometimes get their feelings hurt, but CoCs obviously don't prevent that anyway. The whole thing is dumb.
I would argue that laws are “bad” if there’s no way to get a proper hearing when you’re accused of violating them. Laws should constrain both sides of the law (the person subject to them and the person enforcing them) otherwise they’re just arbitrary rules by the person with more power. And while that’s a perfectly valid way to run something, it’s dishonest to dress “arbitrary personal decisions” up in the trappings of law. And realistically that applies to all the things you listed, COC, NDA, TOS etc.
But if someone can just drag out a law and vaguely accuse someone else of violating that law and then enforce a punishment with no way for the accused to get a hearing or present their case and have a real chance to prevail, then yes I would say the law is bad.
This is nothing to do with Code of Conduct and just one business chosing not to do business with another.
They're a weapon of "social justice" - 90% of CoC rules are common-sense stuff that doesn't have to be said, combined with one or two "progressive" ideas shoehorned in.
I was once told I couldn’t present a calorie counting/diet app at an Elm conference because it violated their CoC about discrimination based on “body size”.
That's just absurd.
Mate, thats just rules. rules you don't agree with.
Often these "rules" extend to conduct far outside of the purview of a project - typically crossing into identity politics.
"If you espouse views I don't like on your personal Twitter, you can't contribute to this entirely unrelated software project."
This can sometimes, in practice, be reasonable. If letting muh_dick_1488 open PRs means everyone else stops contributing, well, you're gonna have to pick a group to keep.
> Often these "rules" extend to conduct far outside of the purview of a project - typically crossing into identity politics.
So rules you don't agree with?
What is purview, and why should a software project be allowed to police all aspects of life and communication because "them's the rules and rules is rules!"
In the same way that any other organisation has rules, which they agree amongst themselves.
The joy of a free (as in not being arrested) society is that if you don't like those rules you are free not to join. Or free to moan about them repeatedly until everyone dogpiles on them to change the rules, or not.
Either way, they are allowed to make rules how they like. Just as you are allowed to not like those rules, and talk about it incessantly.
As I said, CoCs are just rules, some of which _you_ don't like
I mean, that probably depends on how extreme are the views? If you write a blog post about there being too many colored people in London, how are non-white developers supposed to collaborate with you?
Perhaps by minding your own business and focusing on the work? Nobody is forcing you to view that person's blog or to even know it exists.
If that individual's viewpoints somehow visibly leak into their work or professional communications, then you might have a case for complaint or concern.
You are just denying people their freedom of association. I personally wouldn't want to associate with a racist for the simple fact that he is a racist, no matter where they display their racism.
Sounds good - you're free to not associate. The original topic at hand was a code of conduct: this is forcing your "freedom of association" on to everyone else.
That's demanding too much from minorities IMO. OK, you should tolerate a racist colleague, what about a racist boss? Like, you know he'd like to see fewer people like you, and also gets to decide about your promotion or layoff.
Why and how do you know they are a racist?
Cause he decided to let the world know
Again, why are you stalking these people - just ignore it?
Furthermore, by codifying and enforcing whatever your personal viewpoints are in a code of conduct, you've summarily decided for everyone else as well.
Reading what someone has written under their own name for everyone to read is not stalking.
Also not sure what code of conduct you have in mind, but most specify that you should treat others with respect regardless of <list of protected characteristics>. That's not a viewpoint, that's a necessary condition for collaboration. If you feel an uncontrollable hate towards people of some nationalities or gender identities, it would be wise too keep it a private matter indeed, and not make this hate known to everyone
The point that you seem to be missing is that these are projects open to the public: if the person isn't espousing these ideas in the space in question, you're just as intolerant as they are to try and use the color of authority (a code of conduct, etc.) to bar them from those spaces.
"Treat with respect" is a dog whistle - easily coopted for whatever nefarious reason.
"If you do not agree with me, you will not participate in any space where I can drum up enough sympathy (headache) to have you excluded from."
No, the problem with CoCs is exactly that they are not "just rules".
They are something else hijacking the legitimacy of normal justified functional articulable rules.
And "social justice" is often a weapon of capital interests in disguise.
That's why it was kicked into overdrive during/after Occupy Wall Street. The message of bankers screwing over everybody else in the country had clear broad appeal and people were paying attention and talking about the issue. Then, newspapers started reporting that the OWS protestors were using a "progressive stack" to silence white men and give all the talking time to the freak squad... I don't even know if that narrative had any truth or if the newspapers made it up whole cloth, but regardless it was something most American's certainly could never agree with, so OWS was overnight transformed into a social justice freak show in the eyes of the public and people stopped talking about bankers.
Teensy's closed bootloader, USB stack, hardware design are what is proprietary. But the toolchain is open. Eg: I can use PlatformIO, etc. From my perspective an open alternative would splinter the community rather than replace it. Developers value Teensy's polish & consistency (PAnd this is Paul Stoffregen's discipline). If you endeavor to follow this path, you'd see adoption from transparency advocates and research/security-focused devs, but pragmatists like myself would stick with what works and what's affordable. Your real problem is replicating that engineering rigor in an open-source project, is a lot harder than it looks. Let me give an example; STM32 is more open but shows us exactly what fragmentation looks like without unified vision.
Can you design with the STM32N657 at a good price point? 800mhz, maybe faster than the Teensy 4.1?
Trying to parse as I am not in the know. Nate is Nate Seidle, CEO of SparkFun Electronics?
I know SparkFun recently took over Paul Stoffregen and Robin Coon's Teensy production (I reached out at the time and Paul said it was cool).
I'm guessing Adafruit got a special deal in purchasing Teensy's from SparkFun but because of an allegation made by you against Nate, they are responding by dropping your entire product line?
Anyway, good luck to everyone involved. It's a small community of companies that provide for makers.
I have feeling it will only hurt PJRC in the end for trusting sparkfun to sell and manage the teensy "brand"
Can't say I blame them though. Paul and Robin are two people. Sparkfun (and Adafruit) are massive by comparison and have big stores that sell the same sort of stuff in much higher volume. The Teensys are popular. Sparkfun does (or at least used to do) board assembly in-house. It seems like a perfect match on paper.
Paul and Robin were awesome to work with and it was disappointing to see them stop handling their own distribution, but I totally understand the desire to move away from even just the mental overhead involved.
I am completely out of loop here. I think I may have heard about adafruit once.
Your comment seemed the most information to me (and thank you for that) but can you please sum up the whole controversy from what allegations were made and everything because I was sensing that adafruit was in the right earlier but (now I am not?)
I feel like I would benefit a lot if you can tell me the whole controversy if possible. Thanks in advance!
I don't think so, Nate is founder, they've had another CEO for 10 years, signing the letter in this submission.
Hi phil, appreciate the supposed candor here. I'm just an uninvolved HN observer interested in piecing together all the details of this dispute, here are some follow-up questions:
- The first public claim is that you engaged in targeted social-media harassment of an individual ('discatte') [1], linking various personally-identifiable information to their public profile without consent (name, email and gmail profile pic), and further intentionally misgendering/dead-naming them after being made aware that this was harmful. Do you have any sort of public response to these claims, denying or apologizing for this behavior?
- The second public claim is that the email report you sent to Sparkfun [2] was not simply a 'report' of harassing actions, but itself crossed the line into further harassing behavior ('hi jerks', 'you monsters', etc). Did you really, as claimed, copy the former employee's fiancee's current employer in these email threads as well? Any other context on why this unrelated employer needed to be brought into your dispute?
- Not only SparkFun, but it appears you were also banned from Fossoton [3] for CoC violations related to the dispute with discatte, correct? Any other context on this ban?
- It appears that you also sent another user harassing messages to their Etsy account [4] after objecting to your 'doxxing' of discatte's personal information and blocking you elsewhere, and they reported to you Etsy's trust and safety team. Any other context on this separate incident of alleged harassment?
[1] https://digipres.club/@discatte/115600253924804026
[2] https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...
[3] https://gist.github.com/NPoole/8e128edb6e32986755450da9285b5...
[4] https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220
I don’t know what’s going on here but it is super funny to link to [2] and only quote “hi jerks”
> nick has been telling people about the grand old time you two had at limor’s expense, my expense, and others. he says you sat around making memes about us, registering domains, the whole thing.
> you removed [limor’s] name on code. you scraped our site until it crashed and then emailed to get unblocked so your team could keep using our guides. you squatted on the adafruit name for usb stuff. that’s just a sample of the greatest hits. can you "compete" without doing this? did it even work?
Yes, the broader context of that email chain is a broad unloading of a 'greatest hits' of a decade of grievances against SparkFun (the meme site mentioned was made in 2017, by an employee who no longer works there).
I quoted the lines that seemed to most obviously tip that particular email exchange beyond a measured harassment report (as originally implied), crossing the line into what could be reasonably considered 'unappropriately aggressive behavior' (to quote the SparkFun CoC).
I would agree that the ex-employee's 'Sincerely, Fuck Off' was similarly aggressive, but less relevant since he's no longer an employee anyway, and it seemed pretty clear that he was the one being subject to targeted harassment in this instance (having accusations being forwarded to his partner's employer) rather than the other way around.
Not to split hairs here but it doesn’t look like he said it was a measured harassment report. Having worked customer service and HR, it’s somewhat common for people reporting harassment to be irate or even downright rude, especially when they feel that they’re being ignored.
The idea that calling someone a jerk is grounds for a company to ignore a serious complaint is, paradoxically, what some people describe as their reason for being rude.
Anyway I don’t know what’s going on here but “Sparkfun has ceased its business relationship with Adafruit because a guy called us jerks in a complaint about our CEO” would be hilarious
> it doesn’t look like he said it was a measured harassment report.
If splitting hairs, he originally framed the response as 'kill the messenger', implying there was no other reason for them be offended by it, misleading at least.
> Anyway I don’t know what’s going on here but “Sparkfun has ceased its business relationship with Adafruit because a guy called us jerks in a complaint about our CEO” would be hilarious
I agree, in isolation- it seems reasonable to end a business relationship with any rude or hostile partner regardless, but hiding such a decision behind a CoC rationale just for being called jerks would indeed border on 'hilarious'.
In this case, the claim is that the note was also sent to the ex-employee's partner's current employer, which enters less-hilarious territory towards borderline harassment, not a private HR complaint but public defamation.
Taken as one instance of a broader, ongoing pattern of targeted harassment of several individuals, the combined set of public complaints make the CoC reference not at all amusing.
> Taken as one instance of a broader, ongoing pattern of targeted harassment of several individuals, the combined set of public complaints make the CoC reference not at all amusing.
Having read more about all of this it sort of just seems like two dudes that hate each other.
Like for example the Adafruit guy’s complaint that the Sparkfun guy was presently posting about the domain and meme thing was objectively correct, Sparkfun guy posted a screenshot of it in his thread about the Adafruit guy (it stood out because the ‘Gen X hackers want to be Spider Jerusalem’ bit made me laugh out loud. Amazing burn, no notes)
https://chaos.social/@North/115602564578051206
It’s all kind of funny because
Are these dudes going to stop hating each other? Probably not.
Will they stop talking about each other? Probably not.
Will Sparkfun cutting off Adafruit make them stop hating or talking about each other? No.
Will this decision help customers of either company? Maybe? I would guess no but we’ll see I guess.
Like it seems like they should either hire reps so they don’t have to personally interact or just sue each other.
Where I come from, calling the employer of a spouse of the person you're beefing with is such a low down scumbag move, nobody would be particularly surprised if it culminated in a hot blooded murder. Anybody who engages in tactics like that is scum. If both sides of a dispute act like that, I hope they both succeed in destroying each other.
These are uncorroborated, unevidenced accusations, which is probably why they went unquoted
user: xyzzyxy created: 2 hours ago ... ok, so you created it for this...
the individual you reference had already been removed from multiple retro and maker communities prior to this dispute for documented behavior. i contacted them privately using an email address they themselves used on the site they used, specifically to ask for a stop to the pile-on and to see whether there was a constructive way to resolve their grievance. their email included their first name, which i used in direct reply. there was no campaign, no public exposure of private information, and no intent to harm. labeling that interaction as “doxxing” is a distortion that collapses any private contact into wrongdoing.
with respect to sparkfun, yes, i sent a direct email to the founder, and ceo (and contacts i have there) calling out what i believe is a long-standing bully culture tolerated at the top. calling a company out for behavior is not harassment, even when the language is blunt. during this same period, fake accounts using my handle appeared and mass-reporting was clearly underway. my real account was likely caught up in that. retroactively attributing moderation actions for saying their first name on their email is inaccurate.
the various bans you cite did not occur after some calm, independent review of facts. they occurred in the middle of coordinated reporting, they said so.
as for etsy, i asked a seller who was publicly accusing me of “doxxing” a question: would placing an order would expose my personal information? that was it, there was a sticker in my cart already, i know this maker's work. etsy declined to take action that i know of, i just an etsy order, no ban (i did not buy the stickers). recharacterizing that as harassment is another example of inflation through repetition.
what your summary consistently excludes is the long, documented history of nate’s behavior and the impact it has had on employees, collaborators, and partners over many years. i dealt with that for a decade. i am not doing that anymore. drawing a line cost us purchasing a closed source board that only sparkfun makes, so we're doing an open source version.
> user: xyzzyxy created: 2 hours ago ... ok, so you created it for this...
Yes, indeed, given the claims of targeted harassment of random participants this thread is dealing with, I preferred to avoid being personally targeted next just for being another random participant. Others will have to trust that I'm not previously involved, just a HN observer trying to make sense of the details of this dispute now that it spilled over here.
> their email included their first name, which i used in direct reply. there was no campaign, no public exposure of private information, and no intent to harm. labeling that interaction as “doxxing” is a distortion that collapses any private contact into wrongdoing.
Maybe I missed something, but this wasn't a simple reply to a private email as you seem to imply- it was a public social media post linking their name to their account (which they had specifically avoided for privacy purposes), not edited/removed after it was made clear that the exposure of that information was harmful to them, and the misgendering/dead-naming was repeated in subsequent communications after it was made clear that this behavior was unwanted. Is any of that inaccurate?
> what your summary consistently excludes is the long, documented history of nate’s behavior and the impact it has had on employees, collaborators, and partners over many years. i dealt with that for a decade.
Not having been involved at all, I know nothing about the 'long, documented history' of grievances between you all, but if there are missing details that would help further clarify what the dispute here is really about, feel free to go beyond a 'vague public accusation' and share them directly.
> the individual you reference had already been removed from multiple retro and maker communities prior to this dispute for documented behavior.
Their response when you made this claim in November was “what communities?????”. Are you perhaps mixing them up with someone else? (Source: https://digipres.club/@discatte/115595517911363679.)
Links to "hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment"?
I thought the Teensys were made by PJRC. and they seem to list a number of US distributors on their website still. (including adafruit)
Hi Phil, sorry to hear that something went down and involved Limor... that's not cool. A few Q's:
1. Will the freenzy be a 100% drop-in replacement for the teensy?
2. Will the freenzy be able to be programmed using teensyduino?
3. PJRC's bootloader is closed-source (I know, I've built 1000 Teensy-LC's after the product's discontinuation). Does that mean you're sourcing bootloaders from PJRC or reverse engineering the bootloader chip?
Opinion 1: If I can't take code written for a Teensy and upload it straight to the Freenzy, then this is not "Teensy Compatible". Likewise if the pinout is not the same, including all of the rear pcb-pads.
Opinion 2: If this is not actually Teensy Compatible, but just "Teensy Inspired", what about branding this as adafruit's own microcontroller and not cut into Paul and Robin's income by selling a totally different product that rides on their name recognition and decade of work?
I understand selling the Teensy line is out of your control, but what does “support” mean exactly in this context? Will related materials stay on your site?
I really hope this doesn’t lead to “boycott” of Teensy per se. I completely sympathize with tensions running high but please reconsider for the good of the community.
Documentation yes, but also Adafruit has very active support forums where customers can ask questions which get answered either by the community, or Adafruit employees, or both.
If that's what they're referring to, then my question is why does that need to end?
Sorry, I misunderstood Adafruit's position and therefore your question. It's weird that they would stop supporting anything they sold, even if they now want nothing to do with it. (They still have five forums for x0xb0x for pete's sake.) I guess they are trying to make a clean break and want to pour all resources into Freensy.
a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business, "This message is to formally confirm that SparkFun Electronics intends to issue applicable royalty payment for Q4 2025 no later than January 31, 2026, in accordance with previously established timelines."
i get it, they want to keep selling those products. this was probably about money and margins.
> a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business,
The linked website indicates this decision was made on or around Jan 7. Your own liked page is dated for the 12. Unless you’re asserting that the decision was made and effective before Q4 2025, this sounds like them putting in writing that they intend to follow through on preexisting contractual obligations for prior sales. Not really “doing business with while not doing business” IMO.
Post the emails
Good response, but why did you toLowerCase() it? It looks unprofessional.
you just called out nate, which is the thing he specifically won't do to you, phil.
you have scraped sparkfun.com plenty. I know, I've seen the server logs.
regardless, there is no longer private drama.
I live and DIE FOR ADAFRUIT
Seems plain that the PR Release was crafted with intent
This post is not a good look. You come off as quite snide. In particular, things like "Sparkfun will not?", calling a CoC concern a weirdo behavior, responding to harassment allegations by saying the did it first.
This seems very much like two businesses experiencing friction and separating, which happens all the time. You coming in and framing the flames makes doesn't scan particularly positively to me.
What are the impacts if any to the Stemma QT and Quiic ecosystems?
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this is a really obnoxious direction to take the conversation. I didnt even notice his comment was in all lowercase until someone pointed it out.
I wish I could read like you then because it’s distracting to me, and clearly many others, when people write like that.
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I really wish your comment also had some capitalization and punctuation so it was easier to parse. Even ChatGPT had different interpretations.
But PT (sorry, I guess it’s stylized, pt) has written like this for years, long before the recent LLM-based AI revolution (maybe given his position in the tech community he had much earlier insight into what the machines want). It has been one of the reasons his messages always seem aggressive, IMO.
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It's funny because he tried to excuse it in another comment by saying he's using speech-to-text. I really don't understand what this lie was supposed to accomplish since he seems to be the only person using a STT system incapable of proper capitalisation.
It's not difficult for me at all; I can understand it quite well.
Why do I need to prove I'm human to read your blog?
Can't speak specifically for this site, but these days many prove-you're-human tests have been added because of overzealous AI scraping eating server resources unnecessarily and to an unreasonable and excessive degree.
Because AI scraping is everywhere and flooding sites with useless traffic. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best people can do atm
"It's not ideal" is an understatement, I have to do stupid captchas for about half my Google searches.
What kind of blog gets flooded by what, 10/100 req/s at max? Seems somewhere along the line we forgot how to deploy and run infrastructure on the internet, if some basic scrapers manage to down your website.
I have a disconnect here too, which makes it feel like I'm missing something. I'm hit so often with very onerous captcha-like demands or just blocked entirely when trying to make a single page or login request. I understand restrictions for rate limiting and things, but at this rate it feels like it's only a matter of time before the whole web is behind voluntary ID-scan requests for "security" even if laws never come to pass.
Because of enshitification of the internet you now need to solve puzzles before you can access websites. Welcome to 2026.
I'm not sure I can trust someone who seems completely oblivious to capital letters.
Looks like you guys are handling it right from a consumer standpoint. Thanks for letting us know and for not playing the fingerpointing game in public. Looks like you're not playing at all and just moving on. Nice.
The post you are replying to literally is playing the finger pointing game. They level accusations right back at spark fun.
I have zero skin in this game, and personally think the right move is for Adafruit to simply say, "We wish Sparkfun the best of luck" and move on, but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.
> "We wish Sparkfun the best of luck"
This would mean admitting the allegations are 100% true and harming their business even more with the risk of losing it all in worst case. Now we can assume it's not as simple as SparkFun makes it. It's a dirty situation, but necessary, and justified if they are really a victim.
> but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.
SparkFun started the war, AdaFruit seem to only defend here.
> This would mean admitting the allegations are 100% true
I don't see why this would be the case at all.
No bone in this fight, but in this day and age, when someone levels an accusation of unspecified "code of conduct violation", I automatically think "oh, geez another sex pest". And of course start reading because I can't resist tabloid gossip either.
Some amount of defense is appropriate just to clear the air. Maybe this has gone too far, but hey, we're all still reading. I don't even know what a Teensy is.
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To publish such a vague statement is an obvious invitation for speculation. It seems like rather questionable behaviour itself from spatkfun.
The fact that they mention a "private matter" makes me think this is some petty personal grievance that has somehow escalated to this.
While SparkFun may feel entitled to air their grievances as an "Official response", these types of public statements aren't productive for business nor useful/respectful to consumers.
Public notices for the consumer should serve the consumer. I.e. they should only relate to matters that directly concern them, such as notice of availability, warranty, support or the fulfilment of other consumers' rights. Those statements should be unambiguous and not allude to blame or personal tiffs.
While Sparkfun's statement touches on availability it merely does so as a vehicle for grandstanding and retaliation through gossip and drama. The fact that SparkFun notes it's a "private matter" yet chose to involve the public also makes SparkFun look unprofessional, even if they are 0% at fault for the circumstances.
Consumers put their trust in a company, it is disrespectful of that trust when trying to embroil them in personal affairs, they never agreed to that.
What would you have them publish instead? Your curiosity does not overcome the right to privacy of those involved.
> What would you have them publish instead?
The statement that is published places blame, if not accusations of criminal behaviour, on their business partner.
IOW, they already overshared with the intent of damaging the reputation of their business partner.
In my mind, they are already behind; had they released the standard business line "Our relationship with $X has come to an end; we apologise for any inconvenience caused" I wouldn't be so quick to judge them.
But, now I *am judging them, because they clearly felt personally aggrieved by what happened, enough to imply the worst without actually coming out and saying what happened.
nobody wants corporate speak. They are saying they are cutting ties and it's not their fault. No harm in that if it's true.
There certainly could be harm if it's false though, which is the whole point. And they did not give any information to affirm who's fault (if anyone) it was besides hearsay
that's not the point as far as I can tell. The parent was saying the remarks were oversharing, not false.
> No harm in that if it's true.
Same as saying "Behringer is a convicted paedophile": no harm if it's true, right?
Are you saying they're lying? That's a different issue than what I understood him to mean "it's unprofessional". It's flat out illegal.
I would rather they published nothing. There is no need to make any of this public. Just stop selling Adafruit products and stop selling to Adafruit. If anyone asks, then you can say "we don't do business with them any longer". The public doesn't need the rationale.
That's it. Everything else is dragging the community/customers into a fight that they didn't ask for.
> What would you have them publish instead?
Is there any duty to publish anything? They could release nothing, or nothing with any details, if they have some obligation.
Yes, but Sparkfun didn't "release nothing", and now they are opening themselves up to a libel suit.
It would have been far better had they not published anything at this point.
Something more concrete like "on Tuesday at 9pm an adafruit employee sent an aggressive email which violated our COC by calling one of our employees a 'stupid fuckface'".
I don't think that level of detail would be a privacy violation legally and imo not morally either
Nothing, you either want to talk about a problem or not. Throwing vague, empty claims is just a cheap attack on other's company public image
Nothing. They could just cut ties and be done with it.
If you can't publish a complete, detailed, specific description of what you're alleging, with names, dates, quotes, and whatever, then you publish absolutely nothing. Publishing vague and unanswerable accusations is scumbag behavior.
> What would you have them publish instead?
How about nothing and continue to resolve the matter privately? If you intentionally leave out important details and context then you're just manipulating public sentiment to gain leverage on the other guy.
It seems like releasing more would have probably broken the exact same rules they are claiming AdaFruit broke.
if they didn't want to say more, they should have said less.
the way that normal serious businesses handle situations like this is to simply stop carrying the product, instead of publishing vague, unverifiable accusations of wrongdoing. and then if somebody notices and asks questions, you'd give a statement like "unfortunately we could not come to an agreement to continue our relationship with this vendor, but we're happy to be able to continue offering a number of other comprable products".
> Your curiosity does not overcome the right to privacy of those involved.
I agree in principle, but is there an actual right to privacy in this instance?
I'm asking this in the legal sense, not a moral sense.
There is no right to privacy, but they may have an NDA. Also, if they get too specific, they could open themselves up to a libel lawsuit. Though, if they were consulting a lawyer I don't think there would be any release. Simply cut business ties, and move on, it happens all the time, and would leave room to patch things up later.
"they could open themselves up to a libel lawsuit."
They already have.
I think in this case it would be Defamation. But the claim is generic enough to be provable (ie private matter, private emails, CoC violation)
Libel is a type of defamation. Just to be pedantic.
pedantic is the best kind of pedantry.
In my opinion, you either publish everything and every detail or simply publish nothing.
Here is the tl;dr: My business partner sucks and is a bad person. I am not going to say what he did but he sucks. I am cutting him off.
Don’t attention whore on the internet if you want privacy.
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smeeagain2 says:
> Maybe the AdaFruit founder said something unacceptable like "it's OK to be white" or "a man can't become an actual woman just by pretending that he is." That might explain the conflict.
Why would you just invent identity politics issues to be mad about?
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Yes. They really should have just put a notice up that they're no longer distributing AdaFruit products and direct people to Adafruit website.
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I'm still trying to put all the pieces together, but https://digipres.club/@discatte/115588660312186707 sure paints Adafruit as the bad party here, though I'm open to information which shows otherwise to understand better.
This adds some more context I guess https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877
Honestly the whole thing seems like everyone overreacting on both sides. Accusing someone is "doxing" because they used your first name?
The collections of threads, statements, and accusations on both sides are some of the most unhinged things I have seen in a while, and I don't think any of this helps anyone. :')
this all reads like a bunch of nerds with difficulties assessing on where to draw the line. Is it really that hard to figure out that neither registering a domain to meme a person, nor going on a spazz-posting spree and messaging folks over etsy DMs is considered normal, adjusted behavior??
I have to say; they all sound like whining babies with the emotional integrity of a 13 year old hormonal teenager.
And these people run major businesses?
And the complaining about doxxing because he posted the person's email address? Grow up, mate.
Over the years it’s kind of becoming clear that “running major businesses” is kind of orthogonal to “having emotional integrity”. In larger businesses it’s mediated by layers. But just take a look at some of the deranged tweetstorms we’ve become used to in recent times.
I believe they are claiming doxing based on connecting an email to a social media account.
Isn’t that a built in feature of most social media platforms?
Consensually, typically.
Really? Normally it's just like: "Can we access your contacts list so we can match your 'friends'?" And then you do it and it shows you the list of matches. It doesn't ask each individual "Hey, do you want to be matched to this person?" unless you try to friend them. Most ask you when you sign up and usually somewhere in the settings if you want to enable email matching for your account though. So if that's on it's kinda just part of the system unless you turn it off.
Buried in there is the Sparkfun guy did in fact register a vanity domain and stand up a site for the purpose of harassing the Adafruit guy.
Kind of shitty to play the victim at that point.
Is it? It was (as far we know) a mild shitpost of a public figure like from a decade ago. Photoshopping someones head over the Pepe Silva meme is not nice, but its hardly harassment. To me the "worst" thing was registering the domain, which he gave to Torrone and apologized quite well in my opinion https://gist.github.com/NPoole/d9aab9dfa2a18f4141039f7ce3505....
Sure, if this was a pattern of behavior it would be ridiculous to play the victim, but there isn't as far we know. 9 years later, Torrone starts Mullenweg-posting because some random criticized him for AI stuff. He posts their private email taken from a receipt and when blocked he continues with sock-puppets. Sparkfun guy gives a (quite measured) opinion colored by the fact that Torrone is still is doing this shit to random people. Torreone acusses the Sparkfun guy of being his personal Moriarty.
The most unhinged (and cowardly) thing to me is bringing up his partner and his newborn at every turn in his Twitter shitflinging, when any "slights" just seem only directed at him.
(Dude, if you are reading this just log off, this might literally just sleep deprivation. Take focus on caring of your child instead of fighting on the internet)
correct "the Sparkfun guy did in fact register a vanity domain and stand up a site for the purpose of harassing"
From the screenshots posted, you seem to be doing significantly more harassing. Or are those all fake?
That was a shitpost, it wasn't harassment.
And he apologized to you and handed the domain over to you.
And now you've decided, 8 years later, to blow up your relationship with a number of other folks in the industry, over a shitpost and some mild criticism?
Please, for the love of god, just drop this whole thing. Dredging this up from years ago has lost you a supplier of a popular product already, and a number of customers. I know a bunch of people who used to want to buy from the cool woman owned hacker manufacturer, and now won't touch it with a 10 foot pole after everything you've done.
And please, for the love of god, stop hiding behind Limor when people are criticizing you. You have repeatedly claimed that people are harassing Limor, when every single piece of criticism I've seen here has been directed at you or the Adafruit social accounts that you post through. And stop using your child as a shield as well.
You are a public figure, and sometimes people are going to disagree with you. They might find your use of GenAI image models to be problematic. They may find your over-hyping of drama happening in the open source hardware community to be a bit much. But you know what? That's OK. People can disagree with you, and make jokes about that disagreement.
But claiming that you are being harassed because people occasionally make a joke at your expense, blowing up relationships with your suppliers, driving away customers because you expose emails and deadnames (or legal names, in cases where people go by pseudonyms online), and doing it all while using your wife and child as a shield is not very professional behavior.
Step back, take a deep breath, pick your battles, own up to your mistakes, apologize for the places where you've gone wrong, and stop using your wife and child as a shield, and maybe you can repair some of this reputational damage. But you really need to get some distance from this.
This is how you’re coming off: https://imgur.com/a/hiUyh19
You really need to calm down and act more professional.
I don't have a bone in this race, but if someone has deliberately hidden their identity online, knowingly disclosing that is malicious, regardless of any other morality involved.
Consider people who have their public persona very deliberately obfuscated, like Banksy, or Chuck Tingle - it's very intentional that both of them do not disclose that, and if you found out either of their legal names, and disclosed it publicly, it would be with deliberate intent to subvert them.
Or consider if someone posted online they had a beer, and they lived somewhere that considered that an egregious crime even if they did it somewhere that it was legal. If you deliberately released proof that the person posting "I had a beer" was this person, it would have malicious intent, regardless of how you feel about the morality of beer.
> if someone has deliberately hidden their identity online, knowingly disclosing that is malicious
That argument breaks down if the person hiding their identity is doing malicious things. If you hide behind anonymity and you're harassing people and sending threatening or hateful messages, disclosing their real identity is a public service.
Or could I set up an anonymous account, doxx people all day long for the lulz, and then cry wolf when you doxx me for being a prick? :)
If someone punches you, and you punch them back, you're being hostile, but so are they, and a lot of people would say that was reasonable.
If you deliberately go find someone's secret that they hid after you think they hurt you, and disclose it, it's because you're trying to hurt them, justifiable or not.
People seem to throw the words "doxxing" and "harassing" very lightly these days, if you ask me, although I'll give that nobody in this whole mess seems to be capable of calm or even non-violent communication.
Reading this, it looks like everyone needs a break.
This whole thing just seems like two terrible people being terrible to each other and both vying for sympathy to be the less terrible person in this.
That looks like the usual social media victim style posting.
I read a bunch of the relevant social media posts and emails and concluded that all parties are acting deeply childishly.
Nate shouldn’t have made a website with a domain name with Phil’s name and photoshopped meme, and brought it back up on social media years later.
Phil shouldn’t have been so aggressive in emailing Nate’s and his wife’s employers.
Sparkfun shouldn’t have overreacted by cutting off ties with Adafruit.
Nick is the person who made the website, not nate.
Except Paul.
Paul feels like the only adult in this room.
Probably the key to eventual clarity is at PJRC's forum. PJRC makes Teensy. Imho it's a great product, and the owner, Paul Stoffregen, a great engineer and person from my experience using their products.
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
My summary:
1. SparkFun and Adafruit are in conflict 2. SparkFun manufactures Teensy under license from PJRC 3. SparkFun cuts off Adafruit as a reseller 4. Adafruit can no longer sell Teensy 5. Adafruit posts on PJRC forum announcing an open-source Teensy competitor 6. Paul posts that it's outrageous in terms of etiquette that they're announcing a competitor on his forum. Adafruit's own forum only allows discussion of Adafruit products.
He's allowing it despite mixed feelings.
? This may be one of those "90% of the audience doesn't care and is increasingly less likely to buy from either vendor the more they fight in public" situations
Paul is awesome. Seems to be stuck in the middle of Adafruit and SparkFun duking it out.
Gotta love corporate skub fights. Honestly neither side is coming out looking good here.
If you’re not doing business with someone anymore, just drop their products. You don’t owe folks an explanation other than “unfortunately we do not carry that product anymore.”
Are you one of those pro-skub hooligans?
https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/
Nah, just a spectator.
Want some popcorn while we watch? It’s kind of nice seeing a rerun of classic drama given-
gestures vaguely
…stuff.
It’s not just carrying their products. They are the exclusive producer of Teensy boards and are distributing them to many resellers but not to Adafruit.
Okay? That’s entirely their choice though. A supplier can absolutely cut off a reseller for whatever reason they want to, and no explanation is needed from either party. All I’m seeing from both sides is some attempt to “get ahead of” the other’s discourse, which is just resulting in a Streisand effect that makes both look bad to different degrees.
The only winning move is to just shut the f*k up and move on.
The URL for this page is very generic and bound to become a 404 page. Thinking about URLs is important to prevent link rot.
Agreed. Because of this (and regardless), archive everything:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260114140733/https://www.spark...
Sparkfun redid their site a couple years ago and nuked the links to all product pages of retired products too. A shame. I found someone's archive of the old site at one point, but I've since misplaced it.
The URL for this page is clearly a knee-jerk reaction. I don't expect it will survive the week.
Almost like it's by design.
Is "by design" supposed to imply a negative scheming aspect, or am I reading too much into your comment? This page won't really be relevant to anything after a couple months, so if the link breaks I don't think there's a big problem.
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I can't comment on this matter because I don't know the details. However, based on my personal experience consuming Adafruit products and their generous open-source approach, I personally trust Adafruit very much.
Meh wish it was that simple, this paints at least part of their leadership as completely unhinged: https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877
We're only probably seeing part of the whole mess though.
Damn that's a considerable body of work.
Ok, so what's the drama? Because it's obvious that there was some drama there: "inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter," "Responding and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material."
My guess is someone was trying to hit on someone and got mad when they were rejected.
This post [0] suggests that leadership at SparkFun has been engaged in a long term harassment campaign targeting the founder of AdaFruit (Limor Fried) using company resources, and is allegedly using their CoC as a smokescreen to cover up their own bad behavior and cast blame on the victim.
[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
Yeah but this post is not necessarily the truth. This person has ahem interesting history. https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877
Can you explain that link a bit more? People are implying it shows crazy unhinged behavior but my quick read is just someone posting their annoyances.
Give a summary of your thoughts on the linked page
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if they didn't want people to speculate on the details, they could have released a more professional message instead of what they have here.
seriously the level of unprofessionalism at this scale of the market is shocking. you can't imagine e.g. Nvidia putting out a press release like this when they drop a vendor
> you can't imagine e.g. Nvidia putting out a press release like this when they drop a vendor
nVidia used to have a much worse reputation than that.
Companies did not work with nVidia because they liked doing so.
Sparkfun is publicizing the enforcement of their code of conduct, making it a public issue, which is a bizarre position to take. Usually, when there are violations of things like this, you don't discuss it outside a need-to-know basis.
They are inviting us to ask for the tea.
Also it implies that the other side has already made public accusations that sparkfun wants to set straight. What's that info, if any?
given that they didn't even present actual violation in the blog it is very suspicious
I'm not involved with this specific case, but in general it's annoying when people blast some vague passive aggressive accusation publicly, but then retreat behind "it's a private matter! Respect our privacy!" when people are then naturally are interested in what happened. It's frequently cover for a weak argument.
I don’t know what’s going on, but I checked what Teensy is up to these days and it seems that last March they decided to outsource manufacturing and direct sales to SparkFun:
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sparkfun-to-manufac...
Drama aside, why would someone prefer Adafruit or Sparkfun products over much cheaper whitelabel alternatives from China?
A lot of those come with very good support and communities as well.
AdaFruit and SparkFun both provide MCUs, sensors, and other peripherals that integrate well. Couple that with copious libraries and example projects and you may be up and running without having to stare at data sheets and wiring diagrams and JTAG output just to (say) get a temperature reading and display it on a tiny OLED screen.
All of that plus maintaining inventory nearer their customers, doing effective QC on units they ship, writing good docs, etc. means you’re getting something a lot more like a “big OEM” experience from the hardware vendor, even if you’re ordering a handful of parts.
The generic AliExpress vendors, in my experience, do not do most of those things. They all support Arduino and/or PlatformIO, and sometimes a “native” SDK like mbed, but you’re often on your own figuring out how to integrate that bare MCU with other devices you need for a complete solution. Docs are often incomplete or untranslated, and it can be hard to know exactly which chip (or associated components like onboard sensors and BME) is on there. It can change between board revisions, or even identically-named parts from different vendors.
There are other players like M5 and RAK who make nice modular platform as well, but their prices tend to be up there with AF and SF.
Both Adafruit and Sparkfun manufacturing quality is higher than generic manufacturing from China. I suspect that most of the Chinese alternatives meet their price point by using parts that are out of spec and were purchased at a discount by the chip manufacturer (or just scrounged for free from the reject pile).
My primary example is this clock generator breakout: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2045
The board is open source and there are tons of options made in China, often on a purple PCB. I've had terrible experiences with them, over 50% of the purple boardss I've purchased fail to achieve PLL lock because of multiple reasons- sometimes replacing the crystal can get it locked, but sometimes the chip is just out of spec and can't get a lock. Occasionally I'll get a lock on one PLL and the board is partly useable. I've given up dealing with the hassle and now I just spend the extra few dollars to get a breakout that uses parts sourced from authorized distributors that meet quality control standards. Plus this gives the profits to the people who designed the board and released it as open hardware.
I've also learned the hard way that breakout boards from Chinese retailers that look like the real thing but cost less than the price of the component from DigiKey in bulk are a pile of crap.
Whilst it is great that the hardware is open, I have come to the point of not caring that much as it just seems to mean that the market gets flooded with things that look very similar but are terrible. And in the case of that Si chip, it's really just the reference circuit from the manufacturer from what I see.
Adafruit dev boards are way more expensive than Chinese alternatives but I've never used an Adafruit board where I went "why in the world did they do X", where X is some design choice (except having a bright LED light up while the board had power). On the other hand I've had Chinese boards that have a battery jack but an always-powered component on the board uses like 10+mA at all times when alternative choices for the same component use literally hundreds/thousands of times less power (but cost 1 cent more).
I’ve found that adafruit usually includes a cuttable solder pad for the power led when there’s real estate available. Just cut one of those traces this week in fact!
Adafruit is basically the best but their whole reside-in-NYC philosophy makes zero sense. The contention that they can hire better people in NYC holds no water because over 50% of what they pay their employees goes to 3 layers of governments with no meaningful benefit AND their people pay NYC rents.
They could literally halve their prices or double their pay if they moved to Jacksonville or similar. And their employees would get daily sunshine and own a house, instead of inhaling 100 year old dust in the subway everyday, commuting from their tiny 1BR apartment. It boggles the mind.
Turning this thread into a weird anti-NYC rant is certainly a choice.
not everyone who works at adafruit works in our industry city, brooklyn factory. we've been doing remote before it was a thing, you can check out our shows or ask before assuming the worst, but whatevers, you made up your mind and want us to move to florida.
I would love to use Adafruit boards in my production, but I have to resort to custom Chinese PCB stuff to be competitive. I don't want anything, but taxes and CoL is basic business logic.
SparkFun is in Colorado, which isn't a low tax state but their cost of living is still lower. So all else equals, they are going to earn maybe 5-10% more profit on the sale of a commodity item like a Teensy. You have better products than they do, all else equals you could earn 25%+ more than them, by simply moving to greener pastures, whether that be NC, TN, NV, or FL.
>simply moving to greener pastures, whether that be NC, TN, NV, or FL
Yeah, but then they’d be in NC, TN, NV, or FL which, frankly, sounds absolutely miserable. They made the right choice by being in NYC.
Adafruit seems to be doing very well where they are. Why would they want to suffer in such junk states like those with worthless governments when they could continue to be where they are and are happy? They’d also be scraping the bottom of the barrel in those places for talent for the necessary in-person positions. The stars up mentioned sure are cheaper, and they still cost more than they are worth.
As a long time internet user and consumer of products from both Adafruit and Sparkfun, I don't think your participation in this thread is doing you any favors. Like others here, I advise de-engaging with this debacle for now.
LadyAda is 5x the EE I am, and I think highly of myself. The boards are just art.
Adafruit products work as advertised, and are very well documented. Sparkfun is similar though their level of documentation is (IME) a bit more hit and miss.
For rando parts you get from rando vendors, it’s pretty common for schematics to have mistakes, pulldown resistors to be kind of off, and other components to be low quality.
For prototype development work, I’d rather spend a few dollars to have reliable parts that can be easily reordered than spend hours or days tracking down issues in parts that can’t always be reordered.
For post-prototyping and production work, you’re probably spinning boards anyway, and your choices and risks are pretty different.
For me, it's the Teensy 4.x boards. I have uses that consume all of their horsepower. I'm just a researcher, and my prototypes will be commercialized by an engineering team that will use the same microcontroller but on their own board and developed under their preferred auspices.
It's the closest I can get to an FPGA within my skill set.
Also, I think that Paul has been exemplary in his contributions to the open source community despite his own product having a closed component.
Adafruit in particular is very good at providing step by step tutorials on how to use their products, most of them that are nontrivial have a little example project to go with them.
It's also been a good one-stop shop, if you want a little character display to go with your esp32 project they will have one, along with addressable LEDs, battery circuitry, etc.
It's a bummer both sites are melting down
Olimex are a better middle ground than sparkfun or adafruit for the things they cover.
In truth people will spend a lot of money paying other people to shop on Aliexpress for them so they can maintain the illusion they are above all that.
Personally, I've had absolutely miserable experiences trying to get products on Aliexpress.
I have at least 3 paid for orders that literally just never showed up (18650 charger, and two LFP 24v chargers). It's not a huge sum of money (~$45) but it's just... gone. Poof - into the ether. It's been more than 24 months.
I also have had orders take 3+ months to actually arrive. Consistently. And some products that do show up but are absolutely unfit for purpose (ex - copper wire that IS NOT COPPER).
Given the complete lack of reliability... I now avoid aliexpress for pretty much everything.
So sure - something like sparkfun/adafruit/etc is going to charge me an overhead, but that overhead ensures
1. The product will roughly work
2. The product will show up
3. The product will show up on a reasonable timeline
----
The extra money isn't so I can have an illusion that I'm "above all that"... it's literally just setting a baseline service level that I don't mind paying extra for, because aliexpress isn't a reliable shop (and is borderline scammy as fuck).
Just ask for a refund if it doesn't show up or is crap. Not hard.
Even if you do manage to get a refund, it obviously sucks to be in that position where you need one
You usually get stuff for 1/10 to 1/3 the cost. The counter is sometimes you have to do a refund. If you have more money than time, then don't buy from them.
> A lot of those come with very good support and communities as well.
Which ones?
I’ve dealt with Seeed and the quality of support falls far below.
Number one reason would be lead time. Adafruit always ships immediately and the transit time is short on the east coast.
Product support, documentation, comparability, and community support/forums
I have always supported Adafruit -- Limor's principles shine through in the products, the website, the tutorials, and in the long-term track record of standing by their products. Even when I can source things from AliExpress, I often get them from Adafruit.
Speaking for myself, SparkFun has lost me as a customer.
Obviously given the lack of information (maybe for the best?) there's nothing really to comment on when it comes to the allegations
However, I do wonder what this will mean for Adafruit product availability in Europe, as most stores I know of that sell Adafruit products here are Sparkfun distributors.
One of four possible outcomes:
- This blows up in Sparkfun’s face and they lose sales for not having Adafruit so they invite them back. Or Adafruit apologies and comes back.
- Adafruit is forced to become their own distributor and be a Sparkfun.
- Adafruit finds another distributor willing to go to battle with Sparkfun.
- Adafruit is no longer available in Europe.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the big players that I know ship and sell globally like Digikey, Newark and Arrow are all Adafruit distributors, and presumably that wouldn't change. Do you mean brick and mortar or something else?
Hmm... reads a bit like an email a forum moderator might send a disobedient user. This seems strange, verging on unprofessional, for corporate communications.
Ignoring all this drama.
But I've always found Paul to be a good guy, who was helpful and honest and provided a great product. Teensy is a great platform, and it's too bad these other players will have a negative impact on it.
Incredible how Adafruit-sided this discussion is, having seen ptorrone serially creating alt accounts fediverse to harrass people who thought that his behavior was bad [1], going as far as to harrass people on their Etsy stores [2]. I do not expect anything he says to be truthful at all, after having seen how much abuse he spews out.
[1]: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/115605021402124429 [2]: https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220
i asked if the person was going to "dox" me if i purchased a sticker that was in my cart already. there are multiple people making accounts using my handle, so i'm now on a server where there is some due process before fake reports or others pretending to be me.
> i asked if the person was going to "dox" me if i purchased a sticker that was in my cart already.
That implies you asked this of some random Etsy seller you happened to be interested in purchasing a sticker from, due to general privacy concerns. However, as I understand it, you instead tracked down the Etsy store of someone who had criticized and blocked you on social media, specifically to send them further unwanted messages related to your previous conversation about "doxxing" another user. Is this correct?
> there are multiple people making accounts using my handle, so i'm now on a server where there is some due process before fake reports or others pretending to be me.
Nick cited [1] specific since-suspended fediverse accounts linked to you: @ptorrone@fosstodon.org, @ptorrone@toot.community, @ptorrone@cyberplace.social, @ptorrone.bsky.social, @ptorrone@mastodon.nu. Are you denying involvement with those specific alt accounts, or just vaguely suggesting there might be other impersonators out there?
[1] https://chaos.social/@North/115602127173454774
> However, as I understand it, you instead tracked down the Etsy store of someone who had criticized and blocked you on social media, specifically to send them further unwanted messages related to your previous conversation about "doxxing" another user.
I have zero knowledge of the drama beyond reading the posts here, but if this is true then that clearly falls into the harassment arena.
wow, I recommend people read the linked thread, it basically completely exonerates the "employee who made a hate site" with receipts. I came into this thinking adafruit was in the right, but wow
I believe Phil, it was just a big coincidence. /s
after reading all of these mastodon threads and gists, something really irks me.
this ptorrone guy acts in some pretty questionable ways and constantly uses his wife and kids as a shield. if someone gets harassed out of nowhere and their kids or spouses are being dragged into it, then that's truly a horrible, shitty thing to do. but to be involved in and start flame-wars, doxxing campaigns and more and then constantly having to mention that you have a newborn when people push back sounds pretty manipulative.
smacks someone on their neck, "don't hit me back, man, i got kids and a wife!"
I miss the days when we would get Ruby Drama like this every week.
Those guys migrated to Rust and are too busy pleasing the borrow checker now
Until they there's a post about Zig/C/C++ and they come out of the woods asking why it wasn't written in Rust.
As an uninformed observer, here is a possible sequence of events that sounds somewhat plausible based on what we know so far:
Here's the ex-employees side of the story, complete with receipts (taken from another post on this story):
https://chaos.social/@North/115602127173454774
IMO what they did is pretty overblown. They did register a joke domain but basically folded and apologized immediately. Then nothing for 8 years, until they commented on a post where adafruit was accused of doxxing on mastodon.
Wow, that really puts things in perspective.
Phil, based on this summary and reading the emails about what went down between you and Nick, you sound like an absolute lunatic. He mocked you once back in 2017. He set up a satirical website that had a single joke: you as obsessed detective, sniffing out perceived slights. Then, when called out on it, he very eloquently apologized for it, expanded on why he had done it, and offered an olive branch of friendship.
In response, you have absolutely flipped out on him. You've continuously attempted to expand his "crimes" into something against your wife, attempted to accuse him of misogyny, attempted to frame it as an attack on your kids, attempted to loop his employers into it, claimed you'd sue, and called him a bully. And later, when he made an offhand reference to this ordeal (to someone else you appear to be flipping out on), you accuse him of starting a new campaign of bullying. It's so completely out of scale that I have to question your mental state.
And the cherry on top is that in the middle of all this, you took a piece of information -- the fact that he has posted on social media about mental health issues -- and tried to leverage that into a claim that this is all his problem. I'm sorry, but that is absolutely disgusting behavior, and I hope you're ashamed of it.
Between that and his behavior in this HN thread, looks like I'm done buying from Adafruit. Shame, they were decent.
Honestly, if I received an email like this from the MD of a customer, I'd probably want to wash my hands of them as well
https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...
Ah, that is pretty illuminating. Insert “adafruit employee / husband of CEO overreacts to internet squabbles and gets a little shrieky because he’s sleep deprived” in there somewhere.
This reminds me of the olden days of small messageboard drama. It’s a shame to see it affect a business relationship between two good companies. Maybe they’ll make up after it all cools off.
sparkfun will continue to use limor’s open source code, libraries, and designs. that is how open source works, and we are fine with that, and that is awesome!
what is not speculation is - paul (teensy creator) told us directly that sparkfun’s decision to block us from purchasing teensy was final. that was not a heat of the moment thing, and it was not handled through normal purchasing channels. i do not even purchase. our purchasing team does. the same is true of the royalty payments sparkfun has made to adafruit for over a decade under standing agreements. there is essentially no day to day interaction. i asked if they are going to keep paying those, no reply yet.
the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute.
no current sparkfun employee did anything wrong here. one former employee did, and nate’s behavior toward limor has been an issue for years. i am done with that and him, so that part will sort itself out now.
> the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute
That really doesn’t tell me anything. I would like to humbly suggest you’re very close to this issue, in an already stressful personal situation, and you’re reading things between the lines kind of aggressively and overreacting.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and I’m not saying whatever others did is ok, but I am saying that you aren’t improving anything by being here trying to litigate your case. I don’t think anyone who puts any thought into this can legitimately accuse you of anything except getting a little too worked up about it.
Respectfully, go take care of your family.
it seems like if i do not reply, it's worse? i totally get what you are saying, however i think we're part of this hackernews community too, and not here to litigate past issues, and i will probably always get a little too worked up when it comes to what i believe is a long history of a "competitor" doing things outside of "it's just business, get thicker skin" ...
Having read the whole thing in great detail, I’m going to try to give you an honest perspective. Your competitor has done nothing to you. Someone loosely connected to your competitor (used to work there) did something extremely mild to you, and you have been overreacting to it so egregiously that it splashed over into your relationship with another company, through no fault of theirs. It is now to the point that you have made a complete ass of yourself. If you had simply let it drop like an adult, Nick never would have dropped that incredibly damning (to you) email chain. You blew it.
Try this as a reply; "hello everyone. This seems to have all gotten out of hand. We want to continue selling teensy units, We've made a lot of sales working together and I want to salvage this working relationship and ensure we continue to do business together and sell as many Teensy units as possible. Why don't I, sparkfun and Paul Stoffregen get together for a zoom meeting next Monday and discuss this. At the end of the day I'm sure Paul S would prefer his product to be as widely available as possible and we want to help with that. Best regards - ptorrone".
That would be the mature and professional response which ensures continued sales for you, sparkfun and PJRC.
And for Christ's sake stop arguing business issues on social media and messaging boards. What are you doing, man?! :)
> it seems like if i do not reply, it's worse?
Yes, it really does seem that way to you. But only to you. :)
That's not necessarily correct. If you leave something standing without gainsaying it there is a substantial fraction of the viewers of the interaction who will come away with the impression that that party that did not speak up against the last comment lost the discussion because they ran out of arguments. This is so widespread that there are multiple names for the phenomenon and lots of good interaction has been ruined by it.
Obviously I don’t claim to speak for everyone else when I say it only seems that way to him. I’m being tongue in cheek. But I do think it’s the wrong instinct and the fact that some people agree isn’t reason to give into it.
You've already stopped replying, but I think an anecdotal stories might do you some good:
When I was 18, I had a situationship with a girl with abusive parents. One night she texted me to go get her because they were being awful (Mostly to each other) and she wanted to get away from it. When I took her back, even though they had told her she could go in the first place, they were angry with her for being out. The dad, angry with me, yelled at ~10PM and pointed a gun at me in my car.
Latter, the police came by my place and tried to give me a Disturbing the Peace citation. I felt wronged: My only involvement had been to remove a younger person from an already un-peaceful situation! The girl's dad had pointed a gun at ME. I wanted to defend myself.
My mom is a lawyer. She went with me to the station when the police wanted to question me, and she told me to just shut up. Don't answer any questions. Even if it was defending myself. Just. Shut. Up.
She was right, but it was still hard. At one point she kicked me pretty hard under the table to tell me to not talk as the office kept trying to get me to. By doing so, they didn't have enough evidence to do anything. They couldn't press charges, so nothing happened. I would've been innocent either way, and would've won any case, but it was sure a lot easier and avoid a waste of everyone's time for me to not defend myself, because by not defending myself then, I didn't have to waste time in court.
Years later, the incident itself is irrelevant. I doubt anyone else by my mom and I remember it - the notable bit was that the entire situation ended that night because I didn't let my strong desire to show my innocence and wrongful persecution win over the advice of my lawyer-mom telling to STFU.
Now, this isn't to say there aren't time where being very, very vocal is the right call. I could rant and rave to you about the time I really pissed in the cheerios of https://www.scanoss.com/ (With some of it happening here on HN, and me actually "Doxxing" one of their employees after he posted on the HN thread claiming to not be affiliated and accusing me of "falsifying information, impersonation, and even extortion" which was comical levels of bullshit.) but I had public opinion firmly on my side, getting constant pings in discord and slack servers as people wanted to know the latest juicy details and how I was sticking it to them.
Full recap https://opguides.info/posts/scanoss/
But optics matter: It was a David and Goliath situation, where the entire incident happened in a short time frame, and as an individual I wasn't representing anybody other than myself. Those are the factors that change your situation.
You're involving Adafruit in drama and posting quickly, not as formal, adult response.
You're a golliath too, with Adafruit being a pretty big name that everyone in this community knows.
You're involving years old drama, where details are murky and intent and other relationships aren't easy to understand from the outside.
All of that combined makes you look bad, regardless of you're the "good guy" or "bad guy" here. Optics matter.
Sparkfun, by being vague and making an at least surface-level professional page here controlled the optics pretty well. It's only on the surface - as others point out, there's definitely some smells to it too - but rash, fast posting from an individual is what's making the optics bad for you - just like how the CTO of ScanOSS directly responding in my situation made him get over 100 thumbs downs on the GitHub thread in that story.
I think, honestly, that everyone involved - you, the person that's saying you dox'd them, Limor, etc. are great people doing great things that got a little too riled up and let things explode into public drama when really even just being the bigger person and making your FOSS Teensy pin-compatible board would've been retaliation enough in a way that nobody would've seen you as anything but the good guys for.
Honestly, if I were you, even if you believe you did nothing wrong, I'd apologize. Say you're sorry for using their real name. Say making extra accounts to contact them when they didn't want to be wasn't cool. Say you felt hurt, and have been stressed, but didn't realize how what you did would affect them. I honestly don't think you meant to dox anyone, because I don't think you saw it as doxxing. So say that, and say you're sorry. Probably in private first, if you mean it.
i’m catching up here. we have two kids. i dropped one off at pre-k this morning.
i replied to an email from a person whose full name was already in the email and is publicly listed on all of their sites. i said we should talk together about the pile-on. at the time, they believed we had done nfts. we never did.
i can and will apologize. i am not a double-downer. i like changing my mind. if this is the worst thing that happened to this person in their life, and a sincere apology would help, i am fully on board with that. i would mean it. why let something like this linger and turn into prolonged suffering.
there are no other examples anyone has pointed to of doxxing or misgendering. i believe i said “he.” that’s it. i am available, and they know how to reach me.
at the same time, there are people creating alt accounts, including ones using my handle. i see that pattern clearly. still, i understand what you are saying: that i should always take the higher road and be the bigger person, regardless.
my email is pt at braincraft d0t com, open to talk
Can't help but read that and think, "And Nick thinks this email chain makes HIM look like the reasonable person?"
What am I missing about Nick's behavior that is unreasonable?
None of it is reasonable. This is an online version of a schoolyard tiff. Neither side in that email chain is reasonable or mature.
Setting aside any concept of who's "right" or "wrong", if I got an email like this from the MD of a customer, I'd share it with my team, we'd all laugh a bit, take a deep breath, and find a way to de-escalate the situation.
Similarly if I were buying product from a supplier and they made an immature joke I found hurtful, I would probably just ignore it. If it was a recurring problem maybe I'd say "I really didn't appreciate when you <xyz>'d, can we keep this focused on business in the future?" And if that didn't solve things, I'd see if someone else could be assigned to handle the account.
I hope those examples don't minimize what either side is feeling, but I have to say that I don't feel I've seen anything in this thread that gets my blood pumping. Dealing with difficult or rude people is part of the job and part of life.
Taking things personally, especially in business, is a _very_ expensive luxury. And if that isn't convincing enough, if you still feel angry about it in a month you can usually yell at them later. But if you escalate today and feel foolish about it later, it's a lot more difficult to mend the wounds.
Everyone necessarily, axiomatically, thinks that the way they react to things is reasonable.
But not all other modes of existence are automatically unreasonable even if they are different from one's own definition of reasonable.
Even if I would opt to ignore something like that in some paticular case for whatever my reasons are, I would rarely presume to suggest that someone else should ignore something like that for whatever my reasons are.
Are these all teenagers?
This is all just very disappointing.
SparkFun filled a very important gap for me during the downfall of RadioShack. Their Free Day was a source of excitement and goodies. Around the same time they realized the legal implications of Free Day and had to cancel it, (but not because of it) I started buying from Adafruit. Since then I’ve spent many thousands on their stuff. Even when I could get it cheaper elsewhere, I was OK spending more there because of their open source work. I even made a pilgrimage to their office when it was by Ground Zero.
I’m not sure I can find them now, but Sparkfun’s Nate has definitely posted public comments over the years that are not friendly to Adafruit, always clearly rooted in jealousy. One that comes to mind was him telling Adafruit to stop pretending they are an underdog and stop preening that they didn’t (at that point) have millions in sales. I totally believe Adafruit’s account of what Sparkfun was doing.
At the same time, Phil has always rubbed me the wrong way to - too aggressive and a bit rude, even in their own forums, including where they provide customer support on orders. The threads shared of his egregious behavior do not shock me in the least.
I guess this is a good of a reason as any to stop supporting both. I’ll save thousands and I won’t have a continuously growing supply of components for projects I’ll never get around to.
Wait is this actually an extension of the ~Nov ptorrone mastodon cryfest/freakout? I was kind of hoping that whatever manic episode was behind that had come to a close.
It's not clear from the top posts here what on Earth is happening. I've been a longtime customer of both Sparkfun and Adafruit for my kids. What do I need to know?
The only thing you need to know is Sparkfun doesn't distribute Adafruit products. There are other distributors you can find with a web search, or you can buy from Adafruit's website.
This is sad, and it doesn't reflect especially well on either party. Here's the thing, though: we evolved in a world where being expelled from the tribe was a death sentence. When people fall out, often their instinct is to try to preemptively convince everyone else that the other guy is the evil guy who should be kicked out. To convince everyone else to take a side.
We don't live in that world any more. You're not gonna die if you don't convince everyone that the other guy is the evil one. It's perfectly fine to decide that you just can't deal with someone else, and you can do that while accepting that you don't need everyone else to take a side or be convinced of your reasons.
The inevitable speculation will occur, in which I have no useful insight.
I will say adafruit have clearly been heading in a bit of the wrong direction lately. See the misleading noise about arduino, for example. Have to wonder if the whole tariff situation is hurting them and it is causing these ripples.
I did check on archive.org, and the code of conduct is there on March 2025. So they didn't just add it in the last month or so, and then send this notice.
From the Code of Conduct:
> Unacceptable behaviors include but are not limited to: offensive comments, insults, jokes or ridicule; gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior in spaces where they are nor other unappropriately aggressive behaviors; threats of violence or deliberate intimidation; creating additional online accounts in order to harass another person or circumvent a ban; harassment of any form.
I can't help but wonder who decided that, in an electronics forum of all places, *any* form of joke should be unacceptable, but sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic!
Commas are akin to thing(1|2|3) sometimes.
So it's offensive comments, offensive insults, offensive jokes, etc, as I read it, with ; breaking the association.
You're absolutely correct and it's me who has mis-read that part. The point of the oddly relaxed wording on sexual images and behaviour still stands though!
Offensive sexual images and behavior would fall under the first clause.
Then you’re left with the “my tasteful nudes aren’t offensive” defense to which the response is “but they are off topic”.
Presumably that means your biometric sensing vibrator hacking tutorial is still legal.
> sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic
Well if someone was working on something like a medical device there might be some documentation that could be interpreted as sexual but that documenting it was not gratuitous.
The list is supposed to be read as "offensive jokes", not any joke at all.
The image would have to be topical, and the sexual nature would have to be necessary (not-gratuitous) for it to be compliant with that CoC.
I'd be surprised if such an image can exist in an electronics forum because those parameters are pretty narrow. I also don't interpret policy as disallowing any form of joke.
I'm not about to go hunting, but I think I would find a good number of good non-offensive jokes, and probably no instances of sexual imagery.
Just guessing it's to cover pictures of electronic projects involving body parts that are normally covered and/or risque attire?
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It's so the wrong opinion can be selectively enforced against.
The CoC section seems to have been added sometime between Apr 8 and May 18, 2022 and unchanged since then.
I think that there might be a tad of seasonal depression affecting them here. My initial reaction was basically excitement at the drama, but then I remembered that I need to take my vitamins.
It's sad to see two good companies go at it, but I do like the reminder that they are run by actual humans with emotions. This is why we support independent businesses instead of corporations that act like they are run by robots, and likely will be run by robots soon.
Tbh I think both of y'all are a boon to people mucking about with hardware and that petty arguments, MBA parasite stuff, etc is all counterproductive but fight all you like.
I stopped buying stuff from SF/AF ages ago as I find it all overpriced for the most part (for my use cases). But then again I've not been doing too many hardware projects recently anyway.
Odd situation tho, both have been bastions of this stuff since forever.
I find this political mess to be interesting, but I'm not sure it's an appropriate topic of conversation for the "professional community."
It looks to me like people on both sides were bothering the other over and extended period of time and it got worse till it led to this.
Having seen similar over my career I don't understand what digging into this accomplishes besides making all sides more upset.
I do think it is wrong for the professional relationship ( continuing to sell technology ) to be ended over a personal dispute.
From where I stand it looks like Phil is attempting to defend himself by being open about what happened even though the whole situation seems unpleasant.
Besides that I think it is likely best if all sides in this just cease communicating or saying anything more and move on from the personal stuff.
My two cents.
> Without oversharing, recent violations include
I feel like this prevents me from trusting them, since I’ve no idea what was actually said.
Do overshare, remove victim’s information, obviously, but put who did what out there.
Same for any rebuttals, you better bring receipts instead of some vague accusations.
Nice take on creating a thread about freensy on SparkFun's own forum!
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
I actually have a small lot of the Teensy boards for a USB hardware hacking project I was running for a while. For example, I used them to emulate a USB keyboard to automatically press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in Path of Exile over and over to avoid wrist strain during a time in that game where every player needed to constantly hit those keys in a loop to play at decently high levels.
These boards were an endless nightmare to work with. I had to cycle through many different USB controllers and it was really more like voodoo. I tried buying a few boards from different suppliers and every board had the same voodoo so I gave up and moved on.
I ended up getting ATtiny85 to work for what I wanted which sucked too, but at least it worked and was a fraction of the price so I could actually send them to all my friends.
It's amusing to me that the path for this announcement is "/official-response". That's a top level path with a generic name! :-)
I am unsure of the impact of this to the regular consumer as this seems like a pretty niche area. But it's kinda shitty that interpersonal relationships of two companies are impacting their customers negatively.
The onus is not up to public opinion or customer politics to resolve your schoolyard differences. We just want to buy your products and not get loaded with baggage. We don't owe you loyalty on top of the price we paid you for the product.
It's a bad look for the parties involved.
I tried to parse the history and it goes back to 2021 and apparently touches upon pronouns, NFTs, online unmasking and various online battles around the same. Sigh. Can we put this HN thread out of its misery, please?
C’mon people, act like adults. Your community and your customers care far less than you think.
If truly inexcusable behavior has ensued, there are better ways to handle it. An entire profession exists to resolve them.
It feels to me like this should have gone through private arbitration rather than public accusations.
Obviously we don't know details, and Phil has made an effort at responding. However, both statements are (deliberately?) vague, and Sparkfun's CoC is laughably short. I am all for the rules being "Don't be a dick" but such vagaries can hide arbitrary decisions. All the vagaries amount to "trust me, bro" statements and when two well loved groups (AdaFruit/Sparkfun) square up in a game of trust everyone loses, at least in the short term.
Hopefully this gets cleared up one way or another, in a clear way that means we won't be re-litigating this for the next decade.
So the drama.
What do I read to find out what this is about? And should I care?
It's all here in the comments, go ahead if you're entertained by high drama people trying to convince a crowd that they're on the good side. My main takeaway is that the lady with pink hair who made Adafruit and the guy who designs Teensy seem to be bystanders in this but end up both losing.
Wow, after following all of the links here, and wrap my head around this thing, it's hard to shake the feeling that this is merely the start of what will surely be a long and epic drama.
So why haven't the emails been published? Or at the very least, summarizing the contents of the emails that specifically violate the Code of Conduct. I assume NDA reasons, but I could be wrong.
Wow, what a way to celebrate the birthday of a certain tech CEO by crashing-out in a similar way. This is very disappointing.
As someone from Generation-X, all of this is wildly amusing to me. Yes, I am getting old.
Wait, does this mean that all adafruit items for sale on sparkfun.com are going to be on a clearance sale?
No, it means anything they haven't shipped by the end of the day is being cancelled as an order. So I'm guessing they have very little inventory in stock or adafruit is contractually required to buy it back.
"Existing inventory will be sold through while supplies last. Once inventory is exhausted, no additional units will be restocked. We have put the remaining stock on sale." https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...
The question was about Adafruit products on Sparkfun. This answer is about Teensies on Adafruit.
Looks to me like they'll just dispose of the stock and not sell it.
"Existing inventory will be sold through while supplies last. Once inventory is exhausted, no additional units will be restocked. We have put the remaining stock on sale." https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...
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"Existing inventory will be sold through while supplies last. Once inventory is exhausted, no additional units will be restocked. We have put the remaining stock on sale." https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...
> We have put the remaining stock on sale.
Looks like the prices of Teensy boards on adafruit.com are the same as before. Maybe the statement means they will continue to sell them instead of "on sale" in the sense of applying a discount.
That's the opposite, but also cool.
Such drama. I’m going back to BX-24s and dusting off the 1st edition Igoe book.
Why publish this publicly? Now I wonder what really happened.
The SparkFun folks are cool. Back when I was a broke college student, they sent me free electronics kits. I massively respect them for that.
I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.
> Why publish this publicly?
I'm guessing to get ahead of any sort of speculation on why Sparkfun stops carrying their products? Perhaps also to get ahead of Adafruit publishing a similar public statement with more/conflicting details?
Hmm, but the accusations are so vague that it's going to be even more speculation, don't you think?
Yes, and that speculation is going to be entirely around "what did adafruit do" and not "what did sparkfun do".
There is no such thing as bad publicity...
> I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here.
You don't actually know that for a fact.
I suspect they made this public because many customers will notice that they are no longer carrying Adafruit products. I respect both companies greatly and have purchased from them in the past. It will be interesting to see what happened, if that is made public.
Yeah, what a weird turn of events. I have a tub of random little boards and kits from Adafruit... and the same from Sparkfun.
Next we'll see Waveshare and Seeed Studios have a go? Strange happenings.
> I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.
This aspect is not very surprising, it is usually moral high grounders who end up found to be doing something wrong, people like to compensate and try to put down others when they know they are in the wrong.
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Why there is often so much drama whenever something open source or community is involved? The best we've got from the industry so far was Astronomer affair.
It's just a selection effect, the culture of openness means you are much more likely to see the drama.
That said, why does the Musk vs. Zuckerberg cage fight beef not spring to mind? Or Musk beefing just about any random day anyway?
Not to mention the whole "OpenAI going full corpo" drama, that was arguably a much bigger deal, something actually important instead of this small social media debacle.
Ok, ok, I exaggerated. But still, communuty is small, and the industry is big, and drama seems to be handled very differently in both
Seeing how Adafruit recently misrepresented the Arduino acquisition to FUD people this is not surprising to me. Around 15 years ago they had great vibes but the recent stuff is just money grabbing.
sigh Mom and Dad are fighting...
But seriously, this illustrates to me that Codes of Conduct are mostly suspect. This is obviously a private feud (nobody looks to be in the right here and I don't care who started what), so to pull "they violated the CoC" is pure theatre and bullshit. I'm a Sparkfun customer and I find that really disappointing.
> Sending and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material to SparkFun employees, former employees and customers
> Inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter
Well those are fun accusations. Looking forward to adafruit response. Anyone has any context?
Keep in mind adafruit and sparkfun are business competitors. Not saying either is lying but statements need to be examined carefully. For what it's worth I've purchased from both many times and was always happy customer so this is sad to see.
Adafruit's response seems to be here: https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-... (via https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens... )
> in july, we [Adafruit] told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order. for years, sparkfun's leadership ignored specific behavior from leadership (and employees, now former... they had created and promoted hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment targeting limor, me, and others at adafruit. this was done on company time, shared, promoted. this was reported to them. it was documented and ignored. that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_
> months later in 2025, the same individual resurfaced and re-promoted it with what appears to be nate's blessing at the time. we again told sparkfun to deal with this. instead of addressing the behavior, sparkfun’s response was to “ban” adafruit from purchasing teensy by invoking a vague, secret set of rules that neither we nor paul (the creator of teensy) were allowed to see.
> this is not a one-off. nate (the founder of sparkfun) has done this before. anyone who has worked with him long enough knows this is how conflict is handled: deflect, escalate, and try to punish rather than deal with the underlying conduct.
That certainly doesn't come off well for SparkFun.
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nate the founder, nick a former employee who worked directly with nate and the now shut-down sparkx effort(s). nate was the ceo, but had stepped down.
For context: This post by ptorrone suggests that leadership at Sparkfun has been engaged in a long running harassment campaign against the founder of AdaFruit (Limor Fried) and is now attempting to weaponize their CoC to cast blame on the victim in order to deflect from their own behavior[0].
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...For more context: There's also social media posts accusing ptorrone of engaging in harassment campaigns against other people.
For additional context to the context, here's Nick's account of the so-called 'long running harassment campaign' [1]: Nick made a joke site about Phil back in 2017, Phil emailed asking him to stop, Nick immediately transferred the domain to him with a heartfelt apology ("man... I just wanna be friends. I wanna support you and Limor and also feel good about the place that I work (and kinda live). [...] These social tools don't always translate, for that I apologize."), and they wrapped up the exchange on good terms.
[1] https://chaos.social/@North/115602441875664452
I can't care less about what lead to this drama, but threatening people for building a compatible product is a shit move, sparkfun. They have every right to do this.
Not buying anything from you anymore until you back off from this stupid claim. Shame on you.
Oh I missed that detail, where did they threaten?
Another CoC fight.
Feels like a breakup. Damn that sucks, can you get a mediator maybe?
Think of the children...
This is embarrassing and doesn’t belong in HN
Yet another open source drama fest. Can’t be bothered. I’ll buy the best product at cheapest. I can use two stores.
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"adathrowaway" seems only made to come here and post things that are not true? seem my post here, and ask anything.
Please tell us more
PT has always been a bit emotional and reactive, but he's usually on the right side of things. Though it's been many years since I have followed them closely.
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I clicked one of the top level links ITT and mostly it was triggered by two grown-ass children having a disagreement about the ethics of using gen AI and deciding to hash out that disagreement by doxing each other instead of simply talking to each other. But yes, there's also pronoun stuff in the background here, because of course there is.
My new rule of thumb is to steer clear of anybody with a fediverse bluesky whatever account. The whole thing is an echo chamber for amplifying insanity.
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why talk about limor's appearance?
As a pretext for harassing her, it appears.
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> I'm getting a whiff of far-left activism.
I think you're getting a whiff of yourself.
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What's wrong with that? She's working... at a computer... while holding her baby in a carrier?
FFS, everyone has gotten so self serious.
Familiarize yourself with the 'peak male performance' meme and you'll understand my meaning.
Let me make it easy for you: She's killing it in what would appear to be a less than ideal circumstance. She's swatting down people messing with her business while raising a child.
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disagree, and we are not autistic.
your writing style in particular fits with a lot of autistic people I've seen, FWIW. but I don't support using "autistic" as an insult (it's honestly the opposite, IMO)
the person said we are "autistic new york jews"
yeah I don't think that's accurate at all (or coherent?)
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This is not acceptable behavior on this forum.
They know. Most of these green troll accounts are alts of older, established accounts that don't want to risk their karma and a ban on their main account.
Don't bother interacting with them. Just flag them and move on.
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Quite frankly, whenever I see people going the public CoC accusation route instead of talking things out man-to-man or simply parting ways politely, I see man children who never learned to resolve problems in a mature manner without running off to get Mom.
Codes of conduct are an intersectional-feminist political demand, and are often explicitly justified in terms of protecting women and other marginalized demographics such as genderqueer people from what they view as harassment. Talking things out "man-to-man" is the opposite the discourse norm organizations with codes of conduct want to enforce.
The only thing this public dispute tells me is I should never do business with either organization. What is with childish adults dragging "drama" into the public spotlight? What is a "Code of Conduct".
I would have privately let them know we arent going to supply them anymore and wish them the best. That's it.
Public drama is DISGUSTING!
Right, then why are you publicizing / dramatizing your own disgust?
tu quo que
I'm not condemning public drama. I support public drama. I'm questioning you, specifically.
ok
Are you going to answer the question?
no
So it's only other people who can't criticize others in public, for you it's somehow not "DISGUSTING!".
In fact for you, you can even criticize others who haven't even done anything to you. You can do it as a pure 3rd party bystander. But no one else can do it even in response to direct attack.
Super well considered philosophy there.
then please don't start drama yourself, thank you :)
Never cared much for either. Both are just insanely overpriced "maker" crap that ultimately comes from China anyway. You can get cheaper at AliExpress, LCSC etc.
Adafruit manufactures its own PCB's in New York, though the actual chips, leds, etc. come from wherever, which is often China.
They assemble their PCBs in New York, there's no chance they are actually manufacturing the PCBs themselves there however. PCB manufacturing is an ecological disaster.
Since any such CoC violation is very much merely a claim and not a fact, this should probably be flagged.
This makes me think of Park Tools. Park sells bicycle tools. They design and produce an amazing breadth of products. They also produce an incredibly valuable library of instructional content about how to use these tools. Calvin Jones, their director of education, just announced his retirement after 28 years.
Anyway, they just teach you how to do the thing. They somehow haven't gotten into internet squabbles with their suppliers or retailers. I would just call it professional.
Why does this make you think of park tools?