Using Chinese controllers (WCH etc.) in production volumes?

[brucehoult]

You can wave your arms as much as you like, but if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.  I don't give a damn what the root cause is.  The problem is with the CH340/341 and I fixed it by changing to a different brand... a brand with a reputation.

So, next time the Linux driver for your currently preferred chip has a bug you throw away those chips, too? Yeah, that makes sense!

If the driver can't be fixed, or is going to be a problem because the defective driver is dominant in the wild, then yes.  I need devices that work.

If there is an easy path to upgrade, then fine, that's workable.  With the CH340/341, I had the latest driver from WCN and it was nearly impossible to get anyone to talk to me about the problem.  It's not a company well known for its support. 

Is this not obvious to you?  What part of this is hard to understand?

Not my experience.

I, essentially a hobbyist in that field, bought one $4.90 dev board from WCH (on Aliexpress). Some time later I tweeted a suggestion at them, a trivial hardware (CPU) change to make it easier to use standard compilers to write interrupt handlers using their "fast interrupt" mode. A couple of days later their CTO and several engineers were on a zoom call with me, discussing the idea. And they offered to send me samples of any chips or dev boards I wanted, free. (I declined, saying at their prices I can afford to buy them)

[sgnka]

I've been doing business with china for 20-30 years (even used to get whole products made there) and nowadays it is largely a fly-by-night gangster culture. Many firms there don't give a sh*t about anything, are happy to shaft you over, go bust every few years (and then somebody contacts you offering to sell you your property which they stole from the closed factory), they steal your tooling, if they can't steal it they will smash it up, etc.

I've heard this from a few different places. My experience with China has been pretty good luckily, but we were mostly purchasing standard parts with our branding without letting them have any molds/tooling belonging to us. It helped that we worked with some of the larger/known companies and I visited the factories as well. I've always found China to be a pretty "you get what you pay for" kinda place - we made sure we were paying enough for the good stuff. That's not to say we didn't have problems at times, but the manufacturers supported us (including compensating us for a manufacturing error).

Not my experience.

I, essentially a hobbyist in that field, bought one $4.90 dev board from WCH (on Aliexpress). Some time later I tweeted a suggestion at them, a trivial hardware (CPU) change to make it easier to use standard compilers to write interrupt handlers using their "fast interrupt" mode. A couple of days later their CTO and several engineers were on a zoom call with me, discussing the idea. And they offered to send me samples of any chips or dev boards I wanted, free. (I declined, saying at their prices I can afford to buy them)

Agreed. They've been pretty responsive to me, and offered me free samples as well. Just a little worried whether their microcontrollers will be reliable in the long term in terms of almost continuously being powered up for days/months/years. Would also have liked to get an opinion from someone who's used their stuff for a while.

Availability/politics etc. are considerations beyond the scope of this post.

[gnuarm]

You can wave your arms as much as you like, but if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.  I don't give a damn what the root cause is.  The problem is with the CH340/341 and I fixed it by changing to a different brand... a brand with a reputation.

So, next time the Linux driver for your currently preferred chip has a bug you throw away those chips, too? Yeah, that makes sense!

If the driver can't be fixed, or is going to be a problem because the defective driver is dominant in the wild, then yes.  I need devices that work.

If there is an easy path to upgrade, then fine, that's workable.  With the CH340/341, I had the latest driver from WCN and it was nearly impossible to get anyone to talk to me about the problem.  It's not a company well known for its support. 

Is this not obvious to you?  What part of this is hard to understand?

Not my experience.

I, essentially a hobbyist in that field, bought one $4.90 dev board from WCH (on Aliexpress). Some time later I tweeted a suggestion at them, a trivial hardware (CPU) change to make it easier to use standard compilers to write interrupt handlers using their "fast interrupt" mode. A couple of days later their CTO and several engineers were on a zoom call with me, discussing the idea. And they offered to send me samples of any chips or dev boards I wanted, free. (I declined, saying at their prices I can afford to buy them)

And what part of this is similar to contacting them about a bug?

[zilp]

Not my experience.

I, essentially a hobbyist in that field, bought one $4.90 dev board from WCH (on Aliexpress). Some time later I tweeted a suggestion at them, a trivial hardware (CPU) change to make it easier to use standard compilers to write interrupt handlers using their "fast interrupt" mode. A couple of days later their CTO and several engineers were on a zoom call with me, discussing the idea. And they offered to send me samples of any chips or dev boards I wanted, free. (I declined, saying at their prices I can afford to buy them)

And what part of this is similar to contacting them about a bug?

Presumably the part where fixing a bug makes their chips easier to use?

[zilp]

You can wave your arms as much as you like, but if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.  I don't give a damn what the root cause is.  The problem is with the CH340/341 and I fixed it by changing to a different brand... a brand with a reputation.

So, next time the Linux driver for your currently preferred chip has a bug you throw away those chips, too? Yeah, that makes sense!

If the driver can't be fixed, or is going to be a problem because the defective driver is dominant in the wild, then yes.  I need devices that work.

If there is an easy path to upgrade, then fine, that's workable.  With the CH340/341, I had the latest driver from WCN and it was nearly impossible to get anyone to talk to me about the problem.  It's not a company well known for its support. 

Is this not obvious to you?  What part of this is hard to understand?

The part that is hard to understand is why you seem to think that moving the goalpost somehow makes for a useful argument.

All I was pointing out was that your experience was maybe not indicative of the design quality of their chips. That's it. And you are just going on about how the quality of their drivers is important to you, and how you don't care about the root cause, but also it's workable if there is an easy path to upgrade(?!), and then about your experience with their support ... while pretending that that somehow contradicts my statement that the problems that you experienced were probably driver problems.

Exactly noone was saying that you should be using WCH chips, or that you should be using CH340 for your particular application, or anywhere, or that you shouldn't care about driver quality ... but chances are others reading here don't care about (Windows) driver quality, be it because they don't target Windows, or because they are using chips for which drivers are irrelevant anyway, and so for their application WCH chips might be fine despite their driver quality.

[gnuarm]

You can wave your arms as much as you like, but if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.  I don't give a damn what the root cause is.  The problem is with the CH340/341 and I fixed it by changing to a different brand... a brand with a reputation.

So, next time the Linux driver for your currently preferred chip has a bug you throw away those chips, too? Yeah, that makes sense!

If the driver can't be fixed, or is going to be a problem because the defective driver is dominant in the wild, then yes.  I need devices that work.

If there is an easy path to upgrade, then fine, that's workable.  With the CH340/341, I had the latest driver from WCN and it was nearly impossible to get anyone to talk to me about the problem.  It's not a company well known for its support. 

Is this not obvious to you?  What part of this is hard to understand?

The part that is hard to understand is why you seem to think that moving the goalpost somehow makes for a useful argument.

All I was pointing out was that your experience was maybe not indicative of the design quality of their chips. That's it. And you are just going on about how the quality of their drivers is important to you, and how you don't care about the root cause, but also it's workable if there is an easy path to upgrade(?!), and then about your experience with their support ... while pretending that that somehow contradicts my statement that the problems that you experienced were probably driver problems.

Exactly noone was saying that you should be using WCH chips, or that you should be using CH340 for your particular application, or anywhere, or that you shouldn't care about driver quality ... but chances are others reading here don't care about (Windows) driver quality, be it because they don't target Windows, or because they are using chips for which drivers are irrelevant anyway, and so for their application WCH chips might be fine despite their driver quality.

I'm pointing out that the chip does not stand alone, just as few things do. 

You seem to be going off the deep end on this issue.  I found WCH to be a poor company to buy devices from, because they have a product that did not work reliably, and they had no support to help with the problem. 

I don't care what you are selling, support is an important part of what is provided.  You are free to disagree, but that does not make my points invalid.  You are free to enjoy using WCH chips as much as you like.

[gnuarm]

Not my experience.

I, essentially a hobbyist in that field, bought one $4.90 dev board from WCH (on Aliexpress). Some time later I tweeted a suggestion at them, a trivial hardware (CPU) change to make it easier to use standard compilers to write interrupt handlers using their "fast interrupt" mode. A couple of days later their CTO and several engineers were on a zoom call with me, discussing the idea. And they offered to send me samples of any chips or dev boards I wanted, free. (I declined, saying at their prices I can afford to buy them)

And what part of this is similar to contacting them about a bug?

Presumably the part where fixing a bug makes their chips easier to use?

Fixing a bug, which is what they did not do.  They didn't even respond to my attempts to contact them. 

I think it's time to give this a rest.  You get the final reply.

[zilp]

Presumably the part where fixing a bug makes their chips easier to use?

Fixing a bug, which is what they did not do.  They didn't even respond to my attempts to contact them. 

Which is irrelevant to the question of how contacting them about a bug is similar to contacting them about a possible interrupt controller improvement, which is what your question was.

[IOsetting]

I prefer CH340 to other chips because they are cheap (USD 0.22$) and well tested in the market. This chip has been used massively in China market so in most cases, the problem I meet has been met (and possibly been solved) by others, except some special user cases.

About one year ago I met a weird bug when using CH340c, and reported it in their forum https://www.wch.cn/bbs/thread-93271-2.html
Finally it turns out that TLP(https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html) keeps shutting it down and adding CH340 to blacklist solves it.

WCH is mostly responsive, the questions in their forum usually get replied in 24 hours. But they are not quite helpful (in my case), it seems they put less efforts in software/driver. As I am only a hobbyist that bought tiny amount of chips I won't expect too much.  If I am customer of KK level, there will be dedicated tech support to solve my problem.

So it depends on how you look at it, CP2102 and FT232 could be a better choice if the cost difference can be ignored.

[gnuarm]

I prefer CH340 to other chips because they are cheap (USD 0.22$) and well tested in the market. This chip has been used massively in China market so in most cases, the problem I meet has been met (and possibly been solved) by others, except some special user cases.

About one year ago I met a weird bug when using CH340c, and reported it in their forum https://www.wch.cn/bbs/thread-93271-2.html
Finally it turns out that TLP(https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html) keeps shutting it down and adding CH340 to blacklist solves it.

WCH is mostly responsive, the questions in their forum usually get replied in 24 hours. But they are not quite helpful (in my case), it seems they put less efforts in software/driver. As I am only a hobbyist that bought tiny amount of chips I won't expect too much.  If I am customer of KK level, there will be dedicated tech support to solve my problem.

So it depends on how you look at it, CP2102 and FT232 could be a better choice if the cost difference can be ignored.

TLP, Traffic Light Protocol?

[ftg]

I'll have to see if this solves an issue I keep having with one CH340 based project on Linux.
Thanks for mentioning it.