Counterfeit MPU6050 chips from China

[not_crazy]

Hi everyone, how are you? I hope fine.

Several weeks ago I bought some MPU6050 modules, the typical GY-521 module, from China (Aliexpress) .

Yesterday I've received it, and then I tested all of them with an Arduino one board, using the "MPU6050_6Axis_MotionApps20" library, created by Jeff Rowberg. I found that of the 9 modules tested, only 3 of them was working as expected. Five of them were not being initialized correctly and were working really weird (absolutely useless). One of them was correctly initialized, but also working really weird.

Then I modified the library to show the "WHO AM I" register of the modules. The MPU6050 that were working as expected, show a value of 0x68 (as especified in datasheet). The MPU6050 that were not being initialized correctly and working weird, shown a strange value of 0x72. The MPU6050 that were initialized correctly and works weird, show a value of 0x68. I decided to visually inspect all of the modules, with the following, interesting result:






I suspect that it is a different chip from invensense and it was remarked as MPU6050. Good try, Aliexpress seller, but I always test all products and take videos of unboxing and testing before rating them. Of course I will open a dispute and got my money back.

What do you think about this? Do you have stories about counterfeit products in China that you want to share with us?

[Miti]

Counterfeit electronics from China? No, never heard of it.

[Miti]

Seriously now, there's an entire rant here:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/fake-$9-chinese-intel-8087-chip-from-ebay/

[imk]

Hello,
I to have had 6050 initialization issues, found it was due to poor rise times on the i2c clk/data buss.
So i put an i2c bus isolator chip in to separate off the other i2c device that it was sharing  the bus with.
imk

[Kleinstein]

Poor signal quality, e.g. with long cables or too much capacity could cause communication problems. Somewhat partially working is unusual with conterfeit chips of such a type ( get that with OP that are just LM358).

With I2C the value of the pull up resistors can make a difference.
A picture of a chip with the connecting cable to the Arduino may help to identify problems there.

The parts may be low qualtiy, maybe some layout or circuit weakness, but don't look counterfeit.