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

[rf-fil]

Hi, I'm thinking about producing a small device, similar to something like the NanoVNA, for example. If I ever finish it, the plan is to make the gadgets in small quantities and to sell them directly to hobbyists around the world. With the NanoVNA and other similar small projects, there are many crap knock-offs on Ebay and Aliexpress. What could I do to prevent this kind of unauthorized copying?

[coppercone2]

you can make a specification, solder it nice and use real parts.

The clowns that buy those knock offs are not going to be in your price range anyway, so you are not losing customers, its more like you think your losing customers when you see that people want it for 20% of the normal price, but its not like those customers would ever buy it from you at the real price , you know? Illusion of stolen customers.

There is a flock of people out there that just have some dollar limit on buying things (i.e. 50 $). When its available they will buy in hordes. If its not available, they wont buy the similar thing for a much higher price if the cheap one is not available... and it might help sales because people will see some idiot on tik tok with it and think "oh I want the real one".

[coromonadalix]

Cpu or mcu wise,  block them from  being read  for sure,   buff any ic markings on them  ...     or encase a project in full black opxy casing  lolll

But  the thruth, if they want to copy a thing they will find a way,  ic's can be decapped and read  even if it a very costly approach

Nothing can be hidden forever if it's an interesting product who get their attention

[jonpaul]

Just dont build it.

The ChiComs will copy anything, including TM/(c), patents from large T$ firms

Your simple solution:

1/ Do it and assume it may be copied

2/ Just dont do it.

Jon

[coppercone2]

yeah they manufacture pretty much everything. you won't out smart the people that manufacture everything with some sick manufacturing trick

[Kerlin]

A good start is you can stop buying cheap copy garbage yourself and encourage everyone else not to.
The day is coming very close when we will be sorry we bought it, and the next generation are going to hate us for it.

[Jackster]

Someone will always copy your idea. You just have to make it better and offer more than the copy's manufacturer.

[uer166]

What could I do to prevent this kind of unauthorized copying?

You don't. If they do it on a large scale then you've failed to provide a value proposition. Concentrate on quality/service/support/aesthetics/etc/etc.

More than likely though, nobody will bother, just make your thing without worrying about it, it's rare that any hobby project gets copied like that.

[AndyBeez]

Is it open source? Even if not, if your brand is a success, the PRC will make 'compatibles' - often with extra tempting features like an extra blinking LED, or a faster cpu core. Why is the world awash with cheap Arduino Nano clones? Because that's how it is. And where will your boards be made to maximise profit, not in a PCBWay factory?

[Conrad Hoffman]

It helps not to think in terms of a single item. Get it done and get it out there. Make a buck and be on to your next big thing before you have to worry about the old one not selling anymore. Maybe you get lucky and it continues to sell. Maybe not, but you don't care; markets are not stagnant.

[james_s]

The NanoVNA is open source, the whole point of open source is that anyone can build a copy of it. If you don't want somebody copying your product, not making it open source is a good start.

Beyond that there is nothing you can really do to block them, if your idea is worth copying then someone will copy it. Your best bet is to make the product as good as you can, price it fairly and provide good support. Unless somebody can undercut your prices by a substantial margin and sell enough widgets to be worth their while they won't bother to copy it. Spend your time making the product good, don't waste it on some futile attempt at copy protection.

[CatalinaWOW]

The only things you can do involve being unsuccessful.

1.  Make a device with such a limited audience that the market doesn't justify any investment in copying.  How small is that?  I don't know exactly, but would guess the answer is somewhere in the few dozen to a couple hundred area. 

2.  Sell it at a low enough cost that no one can undercut you.  If you are from any Western country this means selling at a significant loss.  For some people and some products this might make sense, but it really isn't a broadly applicable solution.


There are other ways to be un-succesful, but you get the idea.  If you develop a useful and marketable product it will be copied.

[Whales]

Something like a NanoVNA is complex and can't be easily cloned without having to iterate several cycles in performance tuning & verification.  There is a good chance people trying to make cheap clones won't want to put this effort in, they just want to get to market with as low of costs as possible and ride the existing product name.  They will also probably greymarket source the parts, so performance will vary between batches.  You can potentially use this as your advantage.

When your item gets cloned: buy each clone, analyse its performance and list its shortcomings on your sales website.  Make it clear that yours (bought directly from you) is still better and worth the cost.  Of course base this off actual tests, not just guessing based on visual difference, you are a biased party after all.

(I'd even go as far as publishing a document saying "If you are going to clone this device: these are the things you are going to stuff up, please read carefully" so you can laugh at them afterwards )


EDIT: Whilst I'm here: if at all possible try to avoid getting into debt to make this.  If your product gets cloned and you're worried you won't make back costs then that's one problem, but in reality there are many more factors that could prevent you from making your costs back.  Performance, reliability, competition, small market, economic woes, parts shortages (this is slamming lots of small device makers!), etc.  Example comprimise: If you don't trust overseas PCB fab & assembly services (I suspect most sell & share your designs) then maybe make the device out of two mated PCBs from different suppliers, rather than buying PnP + production equipment yourself.  Maybe consider that later if your business becomes reliably successful.

[Someone]

1.  Make a device with such a limited audience that the market doesn't justify any investment in copying.  How small is that?  I don't know exactly, but would guess the answer is somewhere in the few dozen to a couple hundred area.

Personally have been involved numerous high margin million dollar scale projects that would be trivial to clone but weren't/aren't, so its entirely possible to get away with getting a return on engineering. Once you start making XX millions the copy cats (not even direct cloners) step up and join in. Roughly equally likely as getting cloned is some other group also working on the same market gap and releasing around the same time, hard to predict that one.

It helps not to think in terms of a single item. Get it done and get it out there. Make a buck and be on to your next big thing before you have to worry about the old one not selling anymore. Maybe you get lucky and it continues to sell. Maybe not, but you don't care; markets are not stagnant.

Yes! A clone won't reach the market in meaningful terms for years, so if all plans hit that first year or two with plenty of return then its no problem.

[Mechatrommer]

dont open source your firmware, put very hard encryption or mystical schemes as well in there with very big your company name in "about" section... one place that i see very hard for chicom to copy is that, unless very big corp get involved... another contingency is, while selling the product, make sure you have main job such as selling burger, fishing or knitting. so its not going to be the end of the world if your product get copied. even if they cant copy your product/idea, everybody will surely come out with other better and cheaper legit alternatives. for example, its nonsensical to buy Deepace KC901V VNA today when we already have a lot better and cheaper Nano/Lite VNA alternative.

[Psi]

You really shouldn't worry about it,  if they want to copy it they will.
Your biggest advantage is that they wont copy anything until it's popular enough to make money copying it.
So it's not usually a problem you will have to worry about for a while.

One advantage you can use if your able to pick an industry to make a product in is to pick one where brand reputation is important to your consumers. So if china does make a copy no one really wants it.  Automotive is on example.
Also if its a niche product that helps a lot. You can make money selling it but its never mainstream enough for china to bother copying. There is no market for them to sell 10,000 of them.

But if you make it open source / open hardware then all bets are off.
You shouldn't really expect to make money selling an open source hardware product.

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.

Of course you have to consider safety, it's not ethical to make your code do something unsafe even if its copied illegally.

[coromonadalix]

or add somekind of a safety

you open the casing the wrong way and it bust the cpu / mcu  loll

[james_s]

or add somekind of a safety

you open the casing the wrong way and it bust the cpu / mcu  loll

That's a good way to encourage someone to clone it, or to give it a bad reputation. I want to be able to repair the products I purchase. If opening up something deliberately breaks it I'm not giving them my money for a new one and I'll tell anyone that will listen to do the same.

[CatalinaWOW]

or add somekind of a safety

you open the casing the wrong way and it bust the cpu / mcu  loll

Unless your device is physically very large and thus can't easily be bought in bulk, or very expensive this is barely a speed bump.  The reverse engineer merely searches the corpse for the tripwires, buys another and uses the information gained from the first to bypass your traps.  If you think about the hourly cost of engineers/technicians it often makes sense to buy a dozen or so copies to start.  This sets you up for this and also makes it possible to do some product variability evaluation.

It can't be repeated often enough.  Product protection is extremely hard.  People with governmental budgets work at it and do very exotic things and still have only limited success.  Some of the most effective techniques are diametrically opposed to the qualities of a robust and manufacturable product.  Things like exploiting undocumented features in obscure ways, or requiring precise and tedious trimming and tuning to make the device work.

[james_s]

Place a small SMD light detector killer PCB and epoxy it directly onto the main IC of the device so that if the casing is opened and exposed to light in any way it puts the output of a very large high voltage capacitor on all of the pins of the main IC.

It will piss off a lot of customers who want to try to repair your device but it will also work for a time against chinese cloners.

It will do the former yes, but not the latter. It will be very easy to determine what happened to the first one, and then open the second one up in a dark room and disable whatever energy source is creating the zap. Epoxy potting is also useless as a method of preventing reverse engineering. For a while I was routinely repairing potted HeNe power supplies, I found a number of ways to soften and remove the epoxy, I even completely de-potted a couple of them for fun. I have access to an xray machine so it's trivial to see what's inside potting. They are not hard to get hold of.

[james_s]

and disable whatever energy source is creating the zap. Epoxy potting is also useless as a method of preventing reverse engineering.I have access to an xray machine so it's trivial to see what's inside potting.

Then find a compound which is non conductive but bounces X-rays and can be mixed in with the epoxy.

Also maybe placing high voltage capacitors in between the layers of PCBs on both the main PCB and killer PCB.

Ideally all of this killer stuff should be inside of the main IC itself.

How much time, effort and money are you willing to spend implementing all this stuff, knowing that no matter what you do, someone will find a way to defeat it? What substances are you aware of that are non-conductive and bounce xrays? Don't forget what is often the easiest attack vector, simply analyzing what a widget does from a blackbox perspective and then designing something that does the same thing. Most widgets don't do anything especially unique. A competent embedded developer should be able to come up with a functional equivalent to almost any kind of gadget that comes along.

[TERRA Operative]

It helps not to think in terms of a single item. Get it done and get it out there. Make a buck and be on to your next big thing before you have to worry about the old one not selling anymore. Maybe you get lucky and it continues to sell. Maybe not, but you don't care; markets are not stagnant.

When I was working for a company making widgets (HVAC systems and controls, 'smart' home type stuff) we were doing exactly this.
Always innovating and making the next new product to stay ahead of the curve.

[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  
Furthermore, more people will be exposed to the fake, which counts as free advertising for your product because people will see the fake and possibly look for the original. It may also work in the opposite direction, but to a much lesser extent.
encourage China to copy it and make it open source. Just make your product much better, and you'll be ok. Working hard to discourage them from copying your product is a waste of time and money; if they want it, they'll find a way to get it.

[Psi]

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 

[Mechatrommer]

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