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.

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.

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

> 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