What are my options to prevent China from copying my hobbyist product?

[Shay]

Why is this an issue in the first place? If they copy your product, it probably means you have quite a good product; I'd see it as an accomplishment 

Yep, it's kind of like getting annoyed that you're tax bill is much higher this year.
That means your profit is much higher this year 

sometime its fun to use analogy. but this time, sale can go millions (from china) but you got 0 income. not a good analogy

So it's almost like a forced advertisement for your products: if sales can reach millions from China, surely at least a small percentage of those who buy the Chinese version will look for the original.
I assume that it might actually make the original product sell more as more people are exposed to it through the chinese sellers, however, i might be really wrong.

[Bud]

Following all that technical advises and measures given in this thread is a sure way to become a model patient for doctors studying paranoia.

[SiliconWizard]

As always, the best way of avoiding "unfair" competition (including cloning) from countries with low labour (and overall production) costs is not to get into the same league.

Avoid designing low-cost products, you're never gonna be able to compete with China. Let it go. Focus on designing higher-end, more polished stuff with more added value and higher margins. This is how we can survive in Europe and the West in general, and all countries that are still able to have a healthy (although things are going sour for Germany for reasons we know and that have nothing to do with that), like Germany and Switzerland, have been doing exactly that.

Designing low-cost products for a western company is a dead-end. Don't do it, or be prepared to suffer and eventually lose a lot of money.

[Mechatrommer]

yes reliability is one area chicom has not mastered. that one left to us to polish. if one day they master it, then we are just left as a bunch of hard labours.

[Psi]

Yes higher-end niche products are the way to go.

[DavidAlfa]

The design is easy to copy, the software isn't. Make your devices there but program them by yourself.

Anyways, even the big companies do this.
Micron got their DRAM IP stolen by UMC years ago:
https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/10/30/upc-micron-ip-theft-guilty-plea/

[ebastler]

Place a small SMD light detector killer PCB [...]
It will piss off a lot of customers [...]

That is a terrible idea because, as you say, it will hurt legitimate customers. If a clone would actually become available, you would actively encourage people to buy the clone instead of the original, assuming that it does not annoy them with this nonsense.

Just like the absurd copy protection and digital rights management schemes on audio, video and program media made the pirated copies so much more attractive.

[niconiconi]

The design is easy to copy, the software isn't. Make your devices there but program them by yourself.

It's more difficult to copy and will keep the amateurs and hobbyists out, but copying is still very practical. The so-called "read protection" features in microcontrollers are not really designed to protect them from any serious attacks. There's an entire industry in China on bypassing microcontroller code read protection, with an affordable price around just a few hundred dollars. I believe they usually use fault injection techniques, such as power and clock glitching, so that eventually the read-protection bit in the register will get flipped. Some of these attacks have already been documented in the open literature by independent researchers, e.g. see this STM32F1 exploit: https://blog.zapb.de/stm32f1-exceptional-failure/ But the chip cracking industry in China is probably many years ahead, they probably have secret recipes for all common microcontroller models in existence.

More advanced chip cracking techniques involve decapping and erasing the fuse bits under UV light, but these attacks are more expensive.

Back in the early 2000s when DIP chips were still common, in China there were even special microcontroller programmers with a questionable code protection feature that uses high-current pulses to destroy the bounding wires in the programming pins, so that it stops chip crackers from using cheap non-invasive copying techniques.

It's also worth noticing that none of these chip cracking services is necessarily illegal. It's often perfectly legal if chip cracking is only used for reverse engineering with the intent to understand its design (but not to copy its implementation), it's not different from what all big players in the electronics industry do - decap other chips for competitive analysis. But it's definitely illegal if you're copying the firmware and reusing it, and many bad-faith actors are doing it every day.

[NiHaoMike]

As far as FW copy protection goes.  the best protection schemes i've seen are ones that detect when the firmware is running on counterfeit hardware because there's something they didn't know to copy and the FW can detect it. Then the fw switches to a 'somewhat unstable' mode of operation.
Not enough for them to detect it initially but enough to give the copied product a bad reputation.

Any protection system that prevents them coping your product they will figure out how to bypass, but if they 'think' they have copied it successfully they will start selling it.

One easy way to do that on a networked device is to have a cryptographic signature that depends on the MAC address and a private key not stored on the device. Have the check run a good time in the future and have it revert to a default MAC address if it fails. It would work especially well where multiple devices are likely to be in use on the same network.

[strawberry]

problem with market place flooded with counterfeit copies is. it will leave all your sales on your own effort ... (people wont spend time and effort searching for your product specifically)
attracting customers to your own website might be long and costly journey on its own

[jonpaul]

To fab a copy, Setup, NRE, tooling is a fixed charge regardless of qty.

min prod run is usually 1K..100K pcs.

They will not bother if the market is say 100 or 1000

Jon

[strawberry]

how much it will cost to cnc  aluminum for simple mold for manual operated injection machine/device ~40EUR
 

[rstofer]

Really, there is no point in even trying to protect your gadget.  If possible, you might apply for a patent but even that doesn't give much protection and you have to disclose how it works.

The bad guys only need to see what something does in order to duplicate it.  They can write firmware just as well as you can and probably much faster and better.  They could even change out the electronics completely with just a little effort. If there's a sufficient market, your gadget protection will be useless.

There simply is no protection other than patent infringement and that cuts both ways.  How do you know you aren't infringing somebody else's patent?

There's an entire industry dedicated to claiming patents on things that will never be built just to lock down the territory.

[Terry Bites]

They already know what you're thinking mate. Its a cruel world.
Its a niche product so its not attracitve to the high volume knockoff merchants, particularly if it uses pricey components.
Don't flog it in places where they operate- ebay etc. Control the distribution.

[ebastler]

The bad guys only need to see what something does in order to duplicate it.  They can write firmware just as well as you can and probably much faster and better.  They could even change out the electronics completely with just a little effort.

If they only take your concept (which you have not patent-protected), and develop their own electronics and firmware, they are not called "bad guys" but "competitors". 

[2N2222A]

I suggest a different approach to this issue. You should not only let the Chinese copy it, but actually encourage them to copy it when the time is right. But try to make it not end well for them when they do copy it.

The Prolific USB to RS232 adapters are in this category. Prolific keeps changing the hardware and then making new Windows drivers that only work with the new hardware each time it gets cloned by the Chinese. The Chinese seem to be unable or unwilling to make a Windows driver. So the Chinese version only works on the older version of Windows.

1) Design and create a lesser version of your product that is made to be unreliable or to malfunction. When a Chinese buyer buys it to clone it, send them this version.
2) Allow the firmware to be read out from the MCU, but rig it in such a way that an alternate buggy firmware is read out instead of the real firmware.
3) Make a buggy firmware available for free on the Internet and let the Chinese copy this.
4) Have an enhanced version of your product to go out the door as soon as the Chinese clone hits the market.
5) Put undocumented features in your product that don't get cloned, and have an enhancement to your product available that only works with the legitimate version of the product.
6) Have your product produced at lower cost in another country that is not China. Keep the firmware programming local.
7) Use an MCU that is unavailable in China and must be purchased from the west.
Release repair documents or a reverse engineered project which contains false information which would help someone to produce a buggy clone of your product.
9) Sell your own clone of the product at a very low price, tricking the Chinese in to thinking that there is already a clone being made out there. The reliability should be so bad that the sales will be very low and you won't lose too much money on the clone. Accept free returns and then resell the units.

There have already been good suggestions and you can incorporate those things in to the product. How about a chassis tamper switch that switches the firmware out to a lesser buggy firmware if the device is opened?

[james_s]

The Prolific USB to RS232 adapters are in this category. Prolific keeps changing the hardware and then making new Windows drivers that only work with the new hardware each time it gets cloned by the Chinese. The Chinese seem to be unable or unwilling to make a Windows driver. So the Chinese version only works on the older version of Windows.

Is Prolific doing that now? FTDI tried that and the result was I stopped using FTDI parts because it's not worth the risk of my devices becoming bricked if I get burned by a distributor and end up with counterfeit parts. There is huge value in a device working with drivers that are baked into the operating system.