i’ll stop back and answer anything (sparkfun will not?).
sparkfun is the exclusive maker and distributor of the closed-source teensy and informed us we will not be able to purchase the teensy. this happened after i sent an email reporting the founder, nate, for multiple harassing actions directed at limor, including behavior by him and a former employee.
instead of addressing that, they decided to kill the messenger, me, and also cut us off from teensy.
so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters, we are doing an open-source alternative. so customers are not stranded, and this is not a supply chain emergency for us. looking forward to seeing which one delights customers more.
as much as nate wants to continue trying to damage limor’s business and adafruit by scraping our site, and now potentially not paying royalties owed after more than a decade of consistent payments, that’s nothing new. it’s a business strategy to cut others out, not a mystery or a “private drama.”
this is exactly why we do open source. when a closed product or exclusive channel is used as leverage, the correct response is to remove the leverage.
sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.
If it means anything, the first thought I had reading this post was "I wonder how SparkFun is exaggerating or misrepresenting this situation, because I can't believe Adafruit of all organizations is in the wrong here."
> sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.
Ok sure, but the explanation provided strikes me as equally vague. I don't think anyone who isn't familiar with this situation has any idea what the hell is going on between these two orgs tbh.
If a dispassionate observer can't figure out situation without significant effort, then it's very easy to handwave this away as unimportant.
Personally I'd very much hate for that to happen here if something truly noteworthy happened.
The fact that the Adafruit team continued that thread unabashedly after Paul Stoffregen's first reply is an awful look in my opinion. Doesn't seem like anyone here is behaving like adults.
Edit: I should clarify - Paul seems very much like a mature adult in all of this.
Wow, and it gets worse from there. I think Paul is smart to let Phil drag him on his own forum rather than let him go blow up on social media for getting banned.
My first thought was the same. I used to like Sparkfun but then they closed the source of some of their projects (while often "forgetting" to update their website to reflect that). I was concerned when I saw the headline but just assumed that Sparkfun was probably in the wrong even before I saw the comments.
Same. I was afraid that there was some bad egg that managed to get into Adafruit, or maybe someone was having a real bad day. You never know what kind of person someone is off camera, but Adafruit as a company has always managed to give off the most wholesome vibes.
I'll be interested to see how this unfolds. I have little skin in the game being mostly upstream of the supply chain, but I've had reason to purchase from both companies, and hope this doesn't blow up into a huge thing.
That was my first thought as well, especially given the accusation of code of conduct violation. Not that I think that Adafruit is perfect no matter what, but I would have been shocked if this turned out to be true as stated.
Yeah just to add to this pile, I've always found Adafruit to be one of the most reasonable companies in the space. I've been buying their products for a decade.
Why is your "open source Teensy" [0] just an RP2350 on a Teensy shaped board?
In my book, what makes a Teensy a Teensy is 1) hardware support, like 600Mhz clock, CAN, FPU, RTC, other hardware peripherals which the RP2350 lacks and 2) software compatibility with Paul Stoffregen's well documented Teensyduino libraries. I would not buy something else if I needed these features.
Do you plan to do a port? Why not build around the same IMXRT1062? Are you barred from buying Paul's bootloader chips [1]?
hi, great question. we have to start with something and while the RP2350 is not going to beat a 600mhz m7 it is much less expensive, fast to get, has lots of nifty support libraries available, and will definitely do better than the teensy 3.2 which many folks loved so much (and was discontinued during the chip shortage). this is also a great time to add things that we always wanted in the teensy: SWD debug, built in 8 MB storage, lipoly battery charging, open source bootloader, open hardware design. stuff like CAN is supported via PIO (https://github.com/KevinOConnor/can2040), as is USB host on any two adjacent pins. M33 has FPU, and the dormant/RTC mode for the RP2350 is 10uA (see https://www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-pico/...). other 'teensiriffic' things like NeoPixel DMA support is well supported by PIO on the RP2350. as well as I2S audio.
as for the bootloader chip: we don't want to trade one closed-single-source component for another. if we're going to make something it should be fully open source as much as we can!
finally, for teensyduino libraries that you love: there's no reason they cant be ported (we did an audio port for the samd51) - which specific library are you referring to?
Thanks for the answer. I know many are scared off by the closed bootloader of the teensy (though I feel it's a fair thing to do). The lack of on-chip debugging is another shortcoming the Teensys have.
I've been working on an audio project recently, and the the ease of use and feature set that TeensyAudio has is incredible.
Teensy 4 does currently fill a pretty unique niche in terms of processing power though. There isn't much like it outside of professional eval boards.
I think this is a bit tone-deaf the reason why the teensy is so desirable is because of its raw power in such a neat package. The RP2350 is great but if I wanted that I would just purchase it rather than the Freensy
Right, but you're not really competing on processor speed. You're competing on maturity of peripherals where the RP doesn't really match up PIO or not.
Edit: I see you're comparing it to the 3.2 but I suspect most folks are going to be comparing your offering to the 4.x.
Yeah - I don't really consider this comparable for my uses which rely heavily on the DSP and processing power of the Teensy itself either.
Drama and whatnot aside I'm not really sure why anyone would buy the (considerably more expensive) Teensy over something RP based if RP was suitable for their needs already.
Interestingly despite being a Teensy fan I have found myself reaching more towards the RP when I can because I can't stand the Arduino API and much prefer the RP SDK. I do use Teensy without Teensyduino (Makefile based) and also a bit of the CMSIS-DSP stuff directly - but it's kinda clunky IMO.
I've been interested to hear more about use cases for these "hybrid" MCUs, can you share a bit about why you chose that over something like a Cortex-A running linux, or an SoC with -A and -M cores?
It's a good question - unfortunately I don't really have a good answer...
Almost all of my embedded activities are for a my own hobby purposes, and I just like the ability to go 'as low as I can' with projects on MCUs. It's nice to be able to use the device's peripherals as much as possible (hardware DSP etc) and I'm not confident in how I'd do that on a Linux based system. I'm in to building my own ham radio Software Defined receivers and it's nice to keep it completely real time.
If I were to be doing this stuff professionally (and I am very close to people who do at work) then yeah I'd probably be using Zephyr or something.
Ah interesting! I work on (very expensive) SDRs and we make pretty heavy use of Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale SoCs. They combine Cortex-A, Cortex-R, and FPGA fabric all in one package, with some fancy interconnects. So you can handle the hard realtime stuff on an RTOS or in the FPGA, then send the data over to the application processor with a hard float ALU to crunch some numbers (or build some kind of dsp IP into the FPGA, idk much about that side of it).
I've also seen some cool stuff with the BeagleBone products, which have a few TI custom architecture DSPs and "realtime units" which you can communicate with via Linux.
But yeah, I can certainly see how just doing it all on a super fast MCU could be easier and cheaper without the backing of commercial enterprises.
I've always thought it would be cool to design a "poor man's zynq" hat for a SBC. Stick a RP3050 and a Lattice FPGA on there and set up some SPI / UART connections.
it will have benefits over the 4.x - we can always spin up a version with the iMX chipset (we have a metro board with the little sister chip, iMX RT1011 already in stock) - tbh if we did something with the iMX RT106x we'd probably start with a Metro (Arduino-shield compatible) or Feather board since that's a super-popular pinout.
either way, more hardware is better and we don't want to just give people the same-old-same-old... as we mentioned there's lots of things that we can add to make the board useful to people: SWD, USB C, Lipoly batt, onboard storage, neopixel LED, etc). what peripheral/library are you specifically concerned about?
If you replace the Teensy 4.x it would have to be something very close to the same pinout, foot print, cost and features otherwise it would just be a new product. Ideally you would find a way to source the Teensy directly bypassing Sparkfun.
Yes, obviously, but they don't make the chips, so can't you just source the exact same chip, make thing pin compatible and call it a day? Then you'd have a drop in replacement, any changes you make will cause disruption for people downstream.
Mostly I'm just leery of software defined peripherals being at the mercy of whatever community springs up around them, nothing specific. In terms of a Metro then yeah, something to slot in where the Due was absolutely with high speed USB, 10/100 ethernet, CAN FD, and all that jazz that wouldn't work on a $10 board. A SAMV70 successor to the Due?
NXP just seems antithetical to an open platform. Then again Arduino went with Renesas, and they're… not great.
Otherwise it's the openness that would pique my interest. SWD headers, yes 100%. But also the documentation. No half-assed SVDs, buggy closed source flash algorithms (Microchip), wholly undocumented peripherals (looking at you Renesas), stuff like that.
All chip manufacturers are alike in this respect, unfortunately. That whole industry believes that they thrive on secrecy and that simply properly speccing their hardware would already be a massive competitive risk.
> hardware support, like 600Mhz clock, CAN, FPU, RTC, other hardware peripherals which the RP2350 lacks
FWIW, those are all NXP-provided features on the chip, not something Sparkfun has any particular connection with. There are other iMX devices on the market, just not in this form factor. And there are other vendors with SoCs offering similar performance.
Really one of the biggest problems in this market is that everyone is putting the abstractions in the wrong place. We've all collectively decided that this stuff is scary and we need comforting IDEs and hardware uniformity to deal with it.
But... portable software and frameworks are hardly new ideas. Come over to Zephyr and see all the stuff you can run on boards from basically everyone, including NXP.
There's a lot more great hardware for your project than just Teensy, so stop locking yourself in.
Oh boy, just what we need. Drama between open hardware vendors. Neither of these responses feels like the complete story to me. I hope there's a path forward to heal this rift in one way or another. Both SparkFun and Adafruit are doing amazing things for the community and I would love to see both continue to thrive.
There was conflict between the new (old) hardware manufacturer Core Devices, and the Rebble community that's maintained the app store and software for the original Pebbles. I think they've worked it out, but it got ugly for a bit.
Do you have a response/explanation for the two specific accusations about forwarding inappropriate emails to sparkfun employees, and involving a customer with something?
Those seem extremely vague, but I didn't see them mentioned in the blog post.
It would be deeply funny if SparkFun was referring to Adafruit forwarding inappropriate emails written by SparkFun employees to SparkFun, in an attempt to report their harassment.
That is exactly how I understand it at the moment. And depending on the material, it would be a somewhat valid complaint, if the report included the material without prior warning. Though, not valid enough to call CoC on this, IMHO.
It would only be at all valid if it was forwarded to employees who weren’t in a customer facing role.
Saying that you’re required to give a content warning to an account manager for material related to your business relationship puts the burden of responsibility onto the victim. Dealing with the psychological impact is the responsibility of their employer, not the customer.
No, even in a customer-facing role, you won't have to put up with every s**. I mean, it's a business for electronics, not a porn-shop or moderation for explicit material at some social media-platform. There should be a line on what they have to tolerate.
From the little we know the "material" in question would be photoshops made to harass Limor, made by someone at sparkfun. So it would be weird for sparkfun to complain , given the content originated with one of their employees. (Allegedly)
>so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters..
one corporate side overshares by pointing fingers and accusing a different corporation...
so that corporation decides to be the better person, declare the opponent as weirdos, then proceed to point fingers at individuals instead for collective action from the public.
I laughed way too hard at this. Also, I can't even read some of these statements with a straight face because all the project and company names sound completely ridiculous when placed in serious sentences, it's like reading about embezzlement charges for Sesame Street characters.
Hah, really? He's a treasure, met him a few times at poetry readings and such. A quick search isn't bringing anything up but google has been failing me a lot lately. Or I'm failing at google a lot lately.
Weird that your STT doesn't handle capitals, but that's a good excuse. Sounds like you're having a challenging day, I hope my snarky joke wasn't too annoying.
As someone who hung out on IRC way back in the 1990s (and internet-knew Limor from Adafruit back before her handle was Ladyada) I associate this writing style with the culture of a lot of the hacker-related IRC channels I used to hang out in back then.
Some of the same people from that era did in fact turn out to be tech founders and maybe that's how it got carried over into the Twitter-verse, but it predates that.
Adafruit is maybe an all time amazing success story built on giving more of a shit than anyone else. There is a direct through line from reading MAKE in high school through programming the 8 LED POV thing through the rest of my career. Limor doesn't answer a forum question on a Sunday morning in like 2008 and I don't make my mortgage payment this month and my son gets store brand formula. I wish you every success professionally and in this new chapter with your tiny miracle, and I hope for an amicable resolution to this whole Sparkfun thing.
Your other posts have capital letters for technical abbreviations and "Sparkfun", but not for "I" and the first letter of sentences.
Sorry, from a bystander this looks like a straight-up lie, and why lie about such a small thing? It brings into question the truth of your other statements. Just say you like the style if that's the truth.
You are doing damage control on a public forum. Your writing should be precise and neat if you don't wish to appear unprofessional and goaded into responding. Normally, badly written prose is just annoying; here it is harmful to your cause.
It is clearly a deliberate choice to send the signal of conforming to a particular type of non-conformance. It’s a costly signal because most people will see it as having the emotional maturity of a child, it signals to others that given their social status they can afford that self imposed handicap.
I heard that altman does it. I don't care about him enough to check though. More silly gimmicks like holmes talking in a mans voice or jobs wearing the same turtle neck
How it's perceived is no doubt in the eye of the beholder. I can totally see how some people would associate this writing style with children, and so associate it with "vulnerable".
I have no idea what any of this thread is about, but I'm sure the thing that I'm going to remember next time I need to buy something from one of these two is that one of them can be bothered to use capital letters, so I'll use them.
Appreciate the transparency! The one thing that doesn't quite add up for me is SparkFun accusing you of "involving a SparkFun customer" in the dispute. Can you comment on what that might be referring to?
probably mentioning on PJRC's forum they're making their own teensy compatible because sparkfun(Under contract by PJRC as the exclusive teensy manufacturer) cut them off.
I am a lifelong Sparkfun and Adafruit customer, I grew up and went to engineering school just down the street from Sparkfun.
This event will cause me to no longer be a Sparkfun customer.
There is no one that I have more respect for in this world than limor. She has done more for this industry, education and open source than anyone alive.
What’s the deal with 5v, 3.3v and 24v “standards” for sensors? It seems like there are really three different markets and it sucks because crossing “lanes” is really annoying. I like how you all made the qwik connectors “just work”, but now that I’m trying more industrial stuff I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get my 24v world to play nicely with the 3.3v world but of course my 24v world only wants to do SPI over 5v.
Anyhoo, sorry we can’t just stick to the technical drama.
Those levels are based on the electronics themselves. Earlier circuits used TTL which needed higher voltages to signify a "High". Newer CMOS based electronics need less voltage.
Lower voltages help with power savings. Higher voltages can and do work better in high power, high noise environments though! 24V as you see is still very popular and useful inany applications.
great question! so historically microcontrollers (and sensors) were 5V 'CMOS' power and logic. this was way better than the up-to-12V for TTL logic but over time the desire for higher clock speeds / faster IO / lower power means the voltage needs to drop (since power = current * voltage lower voltage is lower power) the next voltage standard became 3.3V. these days, even 3.3V is a 'bit high' and we're seeing lots of device that are 1.8V or 1.65V or even 1.2V max (yeek!) one thing we do for all of our sensor breakouts is add level shifting up/down as necessary so they work with EITHER 5V older boards (yay no need to throw them out!) or with the newer 3.3V boards (woo forward compatibility) level shifting and regulation also reduces the risk of damage from over/under volting or plugging stuff in backwards. this is documented here: https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-adafruit-stemma-qt/st...
maybe someone from sparkfun could post advice for you here too...
Ooh thank you! I often forget that everything is a capacitor/resistor/inductor all at once and i see how at higher frequencies that starts to matter! I think the 24v stuff is also more low frequency signaling over longer distances so rise/fall time is less of a worry but voltage drop / noise is perhaps more of one. Thanks!
Fwiw, I’m team adafruit on this. Hope it works out for y’all
> What’s the deal with 5v, 3.3v and 24v “standards” for sensors?
Historical garbage and different manufacturing technologies. Be happy if you can get away with only 5V and 3V3 rails in your project. 24V is usually to interface with industrial sensors. And sometimes you see 12V as well, for stuff that's RS232 based.
And on top of that you got a fifth standard, 4..20 mA current loops. That one is used for long range transmission of analog values of a single sensor per wire pair, with 4-20 mA being seen as the value (4 mA = 0%, 20 mA = 100%), and anything less being seen as a cable break, anything higher as a short circuit somewhere.
4 to 20mA signaling is only the start of a very specific rabbit hole. Someone had the brilliant idea to encode digital signals on top of the analog current loop. The result is the HART communication protocol, which is old, bloated, confusing, quirky - and it is really popular in industrial automation.
I find it weird to jump to this from the scarce information we have.
"Someone did a CoC violation" is just a way for an org to say "someone was an asshole to such an extent it was driving other people away or getting us into legal trouble", with the manner of assholery defined in the CoC.
9/10 times it is nothing sinister.
Of course right now we just don't know what happened.
The one thing I know is that for threads such as this one it is best to ignore all of the stuff from accounts made just for the purpose of participating in the thread.
In this case, given the topic of this thread is targeted harassment in response to public social media criticism, I think it's understandable that some folks might like to participate anonymously to avoid becoming a future target.
Overall I think Code of Conducts are a net negative. Alleged violations of them seem to be used to lend credibility to actions that otherwise would be hard(er) to justify.
It just dawned on me that CoC docs are basically HR for open source. Point to a violation and voila, that person is gone. “Sorry, nothing personal, CoC violation, there’s nothing I can do”.
Exactly. Without a CoC the persons making hard decisions have to stand behind them. With a CoC they can hide behind the CoC and wash their hands in innocence. This lowers the barrier for making questionable decisions and overall decreases honesty. We've seen this with the suspension of Python core maintainer Tim Peters.
Communities were doing just fine without a CoC up until they became a trend. People got banned too but the moderators couldn't hide behind a CoC to justify questionable decisions.
Communities were not doing fine. CoC didn't come out of nowhere because someone was bored. Having a CoC doesn't absolve moderators any more than having laws absolves judges from having to make good rulings.
A community has to have a set of rules which most people agree on. One of the most common attacks in a moderated forum is "Oh but X did Y" and "thats not fair X can do it"
A CoC can be a simple way to "tap the sign" when someone is being a dick.
It also allows communities to set expectations at the start, not after someone has transgressed and pissed in the well.
In an ideal world, you'd just have a thing that says "don't be a dick" but that doesn't work for many and hilarious reasons. Engineers who who either have a god complex, parsing issues or empathy gaps (either learnt or inherent ) are notoriously difficult as a community to keep from getting into frothy arguments that colour everything and give off a bad smell.
I perceive "guidelines" or "rules" having a very different connotation compared to a "code of conduct."
See for, example, the SQLite team adopting the Rule of St. Benedict as their "Code of Conduct," getting criticized for it, and changing it to a "Code of Ethics" in accordance with the Rule about seeking accommodation with your adversaries.
There are bad CoCs and ways to abuse them and people who do. That doesn't mean the concept of setting social expectations for a collaborative project is inherently bad. Same as for discussion forum guidelines and moderation.
No CoC is better than a bad CoC or one where interpretation is centralized to someone with an agenda. But many times a decent CoC can help newcomers in reading the room and support well-intended moderators in making judgement calls.
I also think good CoCs are small and mostly reactive. It's premature social engineering to spend energy on formulating general policies for things that happened once or twice if ever for the project.
Like, maybe wait until you actually had a couple of slop PRs before spending time, energy, and political capital on an AI contribution policy.
They're a weapon of "social justice" - 90% of CoC rules are common-sense stuff that doesn't have to be said, combined with one or two "progressive" ideas shoehorned in.
I was once told I couldn’t present a calorie counting/diet app at an Elm conference because it violated their CoC about discrimination based on “body size”.
This is like saying "overall laws are bad" because whoever is applying them is doing so maliciously. Even in the absence of COC companies like this always find a way to justify this sort of pressure. If not a COC, it's a TOS or NDA or whatever document acronym you can find.
That's normally good advice, but this is a small enough niche that trust-in-brand matters a great deal. Right now AdaFruit is looking like the villain here. I think a little more transparency from them is a very good thing if they don't want to suffer massive brand damage.
Definitely avoid ad hominems, and focus purely on facts. Provide what information/evidence you can without violating agreements, but only if it's relevant to the situation and includes as much context as possible.
No in this case addressing the accusation is necessary.
I think what's currently been said is sufficient. You need to make a grown up version of the statement "None of that is true", but yes probably best to leave it at that.
Honestly, this being Adafruit, my default assumption is to believe them. Especially with this super vague "please read between the lines because if I actually say something false it'll be libel" accusation.
I understand selling the Teensy line is out of your control, but what does “support” mean exactly in this context? Will related materials stay on your site?
I really hope this doesn’t lead to “boycott” of Teensy per se. I completely sympathize with tensions running high but please reconsider for the good of the community.
Documentation yes, but also Adafruit has very active support forums where customers can ask questions which get answered either by the community, or Adafruit employees, or both.
Trying to parse as I am not in the know. Nate is Nate Seidle, CEO of SparkFun Electronics?
I know SparkFun recently took over Paul Stoffregen and Robin Coon's Teensy production (I reached out at the time and Paul said it was cool).
I'm guessing Adafruit got a special deal in purchasing Teensy's from SparkFun but because of an allegation made by you against Nate, they are responding by dropping your entire product line?
Anyway, good luck to everyone involved. It's a small community of companies that provide for makers.
Can't say I blame them though. Paul and Robin are two people. Sparkfun (and Adafruit) are massive by comparison and have big stores that sell the same sort of stuff in much higher volume. The Teensys are popular. Sparkfun does (or at least used to do) board assembly in-house. It seems like a perfect match on paper.
I am completely out of loop here. I think I may have heard about adafruit once.
Your comment seemed the most information to me (and thank you for that) but can you please sum up the whole controversy from what allegations were made and everything because I was sensing that adafruit was in the right earlier but (now I am not?)
I feel like I would benefit a lot if you can tell me the whole controversy if possible. Thanks in advance!
Hi phil, appreciate the supposed candor here. I'm just an uninvolved HN observer interested in piecing together all the details of this dispute, here are some follow-up questions:
- The first public claim is that you engaged in targeted social-media harassment of an individual ('discatte') [1], linking various personally-identifiable information to their public profile without consent (name, email and gmail profile pic), and further intentionally misgendering/dead-naming them after being made aware that this was harmful. Do you have any sort of public response to these claims, denying or apologizing for this behavior?
- The second public claim is that the email report you sent to Sparkfun [2] was not simply a 'report' of harassing actions, but itself crossed the line into further harassing behavior ('hi jerks', 'you monsters', etc). Did you really, as claimed, copy the former employee's fiancee's current employer in these email threads as well? Any other context on why this unrelated employer needed to be brought into your dispute?
- Not only SparkFun, but it appears you were also banned from Fossoton [3] for CoC violations related to the dispute with discatte, correct? Any other context on this ban?
- It appears that you also sent another user harassing messages to their Etsy account [4] after objecting to your 'doxxing' of discatte's personal information and blocking you elsewhere, and they reported to you Etsy's trust and safety team. Any other context on this separate incident of alleged harassment?
This post is not a good look. You come off as quite snide. In particular, things like "Sparkfun will not?", calling a CoC concern a weirdo behavior, responding to harassment allegations by saying the did it first.
This seems very much like two businesses experiencing friction and separating, which happens all the time. You coming in and framing the flames makes doesn't scan particularly positively to me.
Looks like you guys are handling it right from a consumer standpoint. Thanks for letting us know and for not playing the fingerpointing game in public. Looks like you're not playing at all and just moving on. Nice.
The post you are replying to literally is playing the finger pointing game. They level accusations right back at spark fun.
I have zero skin in this game, and personally think the right move is for Adafruit to simply say, "We wish Sparkfun the best of luck" and move on, but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.
This would mean admitting the allegations are 100% true and harming their business even more with the risk of losing it all in worst case. Now we can assume it's not as simple as SparkFun makes it. It's a dirty situation, but necessary, and justified if they are really a victim.
> but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.
SparkFun started the war, AdaFruit seem to only defend here.
Can't speak specifically for this site, but these days many prove-you're-human tests have been added because of overzealous AI scraping eating server resources unnecessarily and to an unreasonable and excessive degree.
What kind of blog gets flooded by what, 10/100 req/s at max? Seems somewhere along the line we forgot how to deploy and run infrastructure on the internet, if some basic scrapers manage to down your website.
While SparkFun may feel entitled to air their grievances as an "Official response", these types of public statements aren't productive for business nor useful/respectful to consumers.
Public notices for the consumer should serve the consumer. I.e. they should only relate to matters that directly concern them, such as notice of availability, warranty, support or the fulfilment of other consumers' rights. Those statements should be unambiguous and not allude to blame or personal tiffs.
While Sparkfun's statement touches on availability it merely does so as a vehicle for grandstanding and retaliation through gossip and drama. The fact that SparkFun notes it's a "private matter" yet chose to involve the public also makes SparkFun look unprofessional, even if they are 0% at fault for the circumstances.
Consumers put their trust in a company, it is disrespectful of that trust when trying to embroil them in personal affairs, they never agreed to that.
The statement that is published places blame, if not accusations of criminal behaviour, on their business partner.
IOW, they already overshared with the intent of damaging the reputation of their business partner.
In my mind, they are already behind; had they released the standard business line "Our relationship with $X has come to an end; we apologise for any inconvenience caused" I wouldn't be so quick to judge them.
But, now I *am judging them, because they clearly felt personally aggrieved by what happened, enough to imply the worst without actually coming out and saying what happened.
There certainly could be harm if it's false though, which is the whole point. And they did not give any information to affirm who's fault (if anyone) it was besides hearsay
I would rather they published nothing. There is no need to make any of this public. Just stop selling Adafruit products and stop selling to Adafruit. If anyone asks, then you can say "we don't do business with them any longer". The public doesn't need the rationale.
That's it. Everything else is dragging the community/customers into a fight that they didn't ask for.
Something more concrete like "on Tuesday at 9pm an adafruit employee sent an aggressive email which violated our COC by calling one of our employees a 'stupid fuckface'".
I don't think that level of detail would be a privacy violation legally and imo not morally either
There is no right to privacy, but they may have an NDA. Also, if they get too specific, they could open themselves up to a libel lawsuit. Though, if they were consulting a lawyer I don't think there would be any release. Simply cut business ties, and move on, it happens all the time, and would leave room to patch things up later.
If you can't publish a complete, detailed, specific description of what you're alleging, with names, dates, quotes, and whatever, then you publish absolutely nothing. Publishing vague and unanswerable accusations is scumbag behavior.
I'm still trying to put all the pieces together, but https://digipres.club/@discatte/115588660312186707 sure paints Adafruit as the bad party here, though I'm open to information which shows otherwise to understand better.
The collections of threads, statements, and accusations on both sides are some of the most unhinged things I have seen in a while, and I don't think any of this helps anyone. :')
I don't have a bone in this race, but if someone has deliberately hidden their identity online, knowingly disclosing that is malicious, regardless of any other morality involved.
Consider people who have their public persona very deliberately obfuscated, like Banksy, or Chuck Tingle - it's very intentional that both of them do not disclose that, and if you found out either of their legal names, and disclosed it publicly, it would be with deliberate intent to subvert them.
Or consider if someone posted online they had a beer, and they lived somewhere that considered that an egregious crime even if they did it somewhere that it was legal. If you deliberately released proof that the person posting "I had a beer" was this person, it would have malicious intent, regardless of how you feel about the morality of beer.
People seem to throw the words "doxxing" and "harassing" very lightly these days, if you ask me, although I'll give that nobody in this whole mess seems to be capable of calm or even non-violent communication.
Sparkfun redid their site a couple years ago and nuked the links to all product pages of retired products too. A shame. I found someone's archive of the old site at one point, but I've since misplaced it.
Gotta love corporate skub fights. Honestly neither side is coming out looking good here.
If you’re not doing business with someone anymore, just drop their products. You don’t owe folks an explanation other than “unfortunately we do not carry that product anymore.”
It’s not just carrying their products. They are the exclusive producer of Teensy boards and are distributing them to many resellers but not to Adafruit.
Okay? That’s entirely their choice though. A supplier can absolutely cut off a reseller for whatever reason they want to, and no explanation is needed from either party. All I’m seeing from both sides is some attempt to “get ahead of” the other’s discourse, which is just resulting in a Streisand effect that makes both look bad to different degrees.
The only winning move is to just shut the f*k up and move on.
I can't comment on this matter because I don't know the details. However, based on my personal experience consuming Adafruit products and their generous open-source approach, I personally trust Adafruit very much.
Ok, so what's the drama? Because it's obvious that there was some drama there: "inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter," "Responding and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material."
My guess is someone was trying to hit on someone and got mad when they were rejected.
This post [0] suggests that leadership at SparkFun has been engaged in a long term harassment campaign targeting the founder of AdaFruit (Limor Fried) using company resources, and is allegedly using their CoC as a smokescreen to cover up their own bad behavior and cast blame on the victim.
I don’t know what’s going on, but I checked what Teensy is up to these days and it seems that last March they decided to outsource manufacturing and direct sales to SparkFun:
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).
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.
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).
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 think that there might be a tad of seasonal depression affecting them here. My initial reaction was basically excitement at the drama, but then I remembered that I need to take my vitamins.
It's sad to see two good companies go at it, but I do like the reminder that they are run by actual humans with emotions. This is why we support independent businesses instead of corporations that act like they are run by robots, and likely will be run by robots soon.
I have always supported Adafruit -- Limor's principles shine through in the products, the website, the tutorials, and in the long-term track record of standing by their products. Even when I can source things from AliExpress, I often get them from Adafruit.
Speaking for myself, SparkFun has lost me as a customer.
Hmm... reads a bit like an email a forum moderator might send a disobedient user. This seems strange, verging on unprofessional, for corporate communications.
It's not clear from the top posts here what on Earth is happening. I've been a longtime customer of both Sparkfun and Adafruit for my kids. What do I need to know?
Obviously given the lack of information (maybe for the best?) there's nothing really to comment on when it comes to the allegations
However, I do wonder what this will mean for Adafruit product availability in Europe, as most stores I know of that sell Adafruit products here are Sparkfun distributors.
I actually have a small lot of the Teensy boards for a USB hardware hacking project I was running for a while. For example, I used them to emulate a USB keyboard to automatically press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in Path of Exile over and over to avoid wrist strain during a time in that game where every player needed to constantly hit those keys in a loop to play at decently high levels.
These boards were an endless nightmare to work with. I had to cycle through many different USB controllers and it was really more like voodoo. I tried buying a few boards from different suppliers and every board had the same voodoo so I gave up and moved on.
I ended up getting ATtiny85 to work for what I wanted which sucked too, but at least it worked and was a fraction of the price so I could actually send them to all my friends.
Tbh I think both of y'all are a boon to people mucking about with hardware and that petty arguments, MBA parasite stuff, etc is all counterproductive but fight all you like.
I stopped buying stuff from SF/AF ages ago as I find it all overpriced for the most part (for my use cases). But then again I've not been doing too many hardware projects recently anyway.
Odd situation tho, both have been bastions of this stuff since forever.
Incredible how Adafruit-sided this discussion is, having seen ptorrone serially creating alt accounts fediverse to harrass people who thought that his behavior was bad [1], going as far as to harrass people on their Etsy stores [2]. I do not expect anything he says to be truthful at all, after having seen how much abuse he spews out.
i asked if the person was going to "dox" me if i purchased a sticker that was in my cart already. there are multiple people making accounts using my handle, so i'm now on a server where there is some due process before fake reports or others pretending to be me.
As an uninformed observer, here is a possible sequence of events that sounds somewhat plausible based on what we know so far:
* sparkfun employee engages in some shitty behavior (maybe harassment, maybe photoshops) toward adafruit CEO
* adafruit engages sparkfun to ask them to put a stop to it
* employee leaves sparkfun
* employee continues shitty behavior
* adafruit continues to bug sparkfun about behavior
* sparkfun now has no control over employee, wants to wash their hands of it
* adafruit isn’t happy with this resolution, continues to push it, interprets inaction as tacit approval
* sparkfun cites CoC about private matters, inappropriate messages
* HN speculates :)
Ah, that is pretty illuminating. Insert “adafruit employee / husband of CEO overreacts to internet squabbles and gets a little shrieky because he’s sleep deprived” in there somewhere.
This reminds me of the olden days of small messageboard drama. It’s a shame to see it affect a business relationship between two good companies. Maybe they’ll make up after it all cools off.
sparkfun will continue to use limor’s open source code, libraries, and designs. that is how open source works, and we are fine with that, and that is awesome!
what is not speculation is - paul (teensy creator) told us directly that sparkfun’s decision to block us from purchasing teensy was final. that was not a heat of the moment thing, and it was not handled through normal purchasing channels. i do not even purchase. our purchasing team does. the same is true of the royalty payments sparkfun has made to adafruit for over a decade under standing agreements. there is essentially no day to day interaction. i asked if they are going to keep paying those, no reply yet.
the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute.
no current sparkfun employee did anything wrong here. one former employee did, and nate’s behavior toward limor has been an issue for years. i am done with that and him, so that part will sort itself out now.
> the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute
That really doesn’t tell me anything. I would like to humbly suggest you’re very close to this issue, in an already stressful personal situation, and you’re reading things between the lines kind of aggressively and overreacting.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and I’m not saying whatever others did is ok, but I am saying that you aren’t improving anything by being here trying to litigate your case. I don’t think anyone who puts any thought into this can legitimately accuse you of anything except getting a little too worked up about it.
it seems like if i do not reply, it's worse? i totally get what you are saying, however i think we're part of this hackernews community too, and not here to litigate past issues, and i will probably always get a little too worked up when it comes to what i believe is a long history of a "competitor" doing things outside of "it's just business, get thicker skin" ...
That's not necessarily correct. If you leave something standing without gainsaying it there is a substantial fraction of the viewers of the interaction who will come away with the impression that that party that did not speak up against the last comment lost the discussion because they ran out of arguments. This is so widespread that there are multiple names for the phenomenon and lots of good interaction has been ruined by it.
Setting aside any concept of who's "right" or "wrong", if I got an email like this from the MD of a customer, I'd share it with my team, we'd all laugh a bit, take a deep breath, and find a way to de-escalate the situation.
Similarly if I were buying product from a supplier and they made an immature joke I found hurtful, I would probably just ignore it. If it was a recurring problem maybe I'd say "I really didn't appreciate when you <xyz>'d, can we keep this focused on business in the future?" And if that didn't solve things, I'd see if someone else could be assigned to handle the account.
I hope those examples don't minimize what either side is feeling, but I have to say that I don't feel I've seen anything in this thread that gets my blood pumping. Dealing with difficult or rude people is part of the job and part of life.
Taking things personally, especially in business, is a _very_ expensive luxury. And if that isn't convincing enough, if you still feel angry about it in a month you can usually yell at them later. But if you escalate today and feel foolish about it later, it's a lot more difficult to mend the wounds.
I tried to parse the history and it goes back to 2021 and apparently touches upon pronouns, NFTs, online unmasking and various online battles around the same. Sigh. Can we put this HN thread out of its misery, please?
No, it means anything they haven't shipped by the end of the day is being cancelled as an order. So I'm guessing they have very little inventory in stock or adafruit is contractually required to buy it back.
Looks like the prices of Teensy boards on adafruit.com are the same as before. Maybe the statement means they will continue to sell them instead of "on sale" in the sense of applying a discount.
For context: This post by ptorrone suggests that leadership at Sparkfun has been engaged in a long running harassment campaign against the founder of AdaFruit (Limor Fried) and is now attempting to weaponize their CoC to cast blame on the victim in order to deflect from their own behavior[0].
for anyone still reading:
in july, we told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order. for years, sparkfun's leadership ignored specific behavior from leadership (and employees, now former... they had created and promoted hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment targeting limor, me, and others at adafruit. this was done on company time, shared, promoted. this was reported to them. it was documented and ignored. that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_
months later in 2025, the same individual resurfaced and re-promoted it with what appears to be nate's blessing at the time. we again told sparkfun to deal with this. instead of addressing the behavior, sparkfun’s response was to “ban” adafruit from purchasing teensy by invoking a vague, secret set of rules that neither we nor paul (the creator of teensy) were allowed to see.
this is not a one-off. nate (the founder of sparkfun) has done this before. anyone who has worked with him long enough knows this is how conflict is handled: deflect, escalate, and try to punish rather than deal with the underlying conduct.
we do not respond to bullying by backing down. we never have. that is why we are here.
I am unsure of the impact of this to the regular consumer as this seems like a pretty niche area. But it's kinda shitty that interpersonal relationships of two companies are impacting their customers negatively.
The onus is not up to public opinion or customer politics to resolve your schoolyard differences. We just want to buy your products and not get loaded with baggage. We don't owe you loyalty on top of the price we paid you for the product.
Obviously we don't know details, and Phil has made an effort at responding. However, both statements are (deliberately?) vague, and Sparkfun's CoC is laughably short. I am all for the rules being "Don't be a dick" but such vagaries can hide arbitrary decisions. All the vagaries amount to "trust me, bro" statements and when two well loved groups (AdaFruit/Sparkfun) square up in a game of trust everyone loses, at least in the short term.
Hopefully this gets cleared up one way or another, in a clear way that means we won't be re-litigating this for the next decade.
> Sending and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material to SparkFun employees, former employees and customers
> Inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter
Well those are fun accusations. Looking forward to adafruit response. Anyone has any context?
Keep in mind adafruit and sparkfun are business competitors. Not saying either is lying but statements need to be examined carefully. For what it's worth I've purchased from both many times and was always happy customer so this is sad to see.
> in july, we [Adafruit] told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order. for years, sparkfun's leadership ignored specific behavior from leadership (and employees, now former... they had created and promoted hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment targeting limor, me, and others at adafruit. this was done on company time, shared, promoted. this was reported to them. it was documented and ignored. that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_
> months later in 2025, the same individual resurfaced and re-promoted it with what appears to be nate's blessing at the time. we again told sparkfun to deal with this. instead of addressing the behavior, sparkfun’s response was to “ban” adafruit from purchasing teensy by invoking a vague, secret set of rules that neither we nor paul (the creator of teensy) were allowed to see.
> this is not a one-off. nate (the founder of sparkfun) has done this before. anyone who has worked with him long enough knows this is how conflict is handled: deflect, escalate, and try to punish rather than deal with the underlying conduct.
The only thing this public dispute tells me is I should never do business with either organization. What is with childish adults dragging "drama" into the public spotlight? What is a "Code of Conduct".
I would have privately let them know we arent going to supply them anymore and wish them the best. That's it.
Quite frankly, whenever I see people going the public CoC accusation route instead of talking things out man-to-man or simply parting ways politely, I see man children who never learned to resolve problems in a mature manner without running off to get Mom.
Why publish this publicly? Now I wonder what really happened.
The SparkFun folks are cool. Back when I was a broke college student, they sent me free electronics kits. I massively respect them for that.
I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.
I'm guessing to get ahead of any sort of speculation on why Sparkfun stops carrying their products? Perhaps also to get ahead of Adafruit publishing a similar public statement with more/conflicting details?
I suspect they made this public because many customers will notice that they are no longer carrying Adafruit products. I respect both companies greatly and have purchased from them in the past. It will be interesting to see what happened, if that is made public.
> I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.
This aspect is not very surprising, it is usually moral high grounders who end up found to be doing something wrong, people like to compensate and try to put down others when they know they are in the wrong.
Why there is often so much drama whenever something open source or community is involved? The best we've got from the industry so far was Astronomer affair.
It's just a selection effect, the culture of openness means you are much more likely to see the drama.
That said, why does the Musk vs. Zuckerberg cage fight beef not spring to mind? Or Musk beefing just about any random day anyway?
Not to mention the whole "OpenAI going full corpo" drama, that was arguably a much bigger deal, something actually important instead of this small social media debacle.
The inevitable speculation will occur, in which I have no useful insight.
I will say adafruit have clearly been heading in a bit of the wrong direction lately. See the misleading noise about arduino, for example. Have to wonder if the whole tariff situation is hurting them and it is causing these ripples.
I did check on archive.org, and the code of conduct is there on March 2025. So they didn't just add it in the last month or so, and then send this notice.
> Unacceptable behaviors include but are not limited to: offensive comments, insults, jokes or ridicule; gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior in spaces where they are nor other unappropriately aggressive behaviors; threats of violence or deliberate intimidation; creating additional online accounts in order to harass another person or circumvent a ban; harassment of any form.
I can't help but wonder who decided that, in an electronics forum of all places, *any* form of joke should be unacceptable, but sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic!
The image would have to be topical, and the sexual nature would have to be necessary (not-gratuitous) for it to be compliant with that CoC.
I'd be surprised if such an image can exist in an electronics forum because those parameters are pretty narrow.
I also don't interpret policy as disallowing any form of joke.
I'm not about to go hunting, but I think I would find a good number of good non-offensive jokes, and probably no instances of sexual imagery.
You're absolutely correct and it's me who has mis-read that part. The point of the oddly relaxed wording on sexual images and behaviour still stands though!
> sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic
Well if someone was working on something like a medical device there might be some documentation that could be interpreted as sexual but that documenting it was not gratuitous.
hi, phil here — post on adafruit here: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...
i’ll stop back and answer anything (sparkfun will not?).
sparkfun is the exclusive maker and distributor of the closed-source teensy and informed us we will not be able to purchase the teensy. this happened after i sent an email reporting the founder, nate, for multiple harassing actions directed at limor, including behavior by him and a former employee.
instead of addressing that, they decided to kill the messenger, me, and also cut us off from teensy.
so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters, we are doing an open-source alternative. so customers are not stranded, and this is not a supply chain emergency for us. looking forward to seeing which one delights customers more.
as much as nate wants to continue trying to damage limor’s business and adafruit by scraping our site, and now potentially not paying royalties owed after more than a decade of consistent payments, that’s nothing new. it’s a business strategy to cut others out, not a mystery or a “private drama.”
this is exactly why we do open source. when a closed product or exclusive channel is used as leverage, the correct response is to remove the leverage.
sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.
ask away!
If it means anything, the first thought I had reading this post was "I wonder how SparkFun is exaggerating or misrepresenting this situation, because I can't believe Adafruit of all organizations is in the wrong here."
See additional context for the accusation(s) here[0].
[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
> sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.
Ok sure, but the explanation provided strikes me as equally vague. I don't think anyone who isn't familiar with this situation has any idea what the hell is going on between these two orgs tbh.
If a dispassionate observer can't figure out situation without significant effort, then it's very easy to handwave this away as unimportant.
Personally I'd very much hate for that to happen here if something truly noteworthy happened.
The fact that the Adafruit team continued that thread unabashedly after Paul Stoffregen's first reply is an awful look in my opinion. Doesn't seem like anyone here is behaving like adults.
Edit: I should clarify - Paul seems very much like a mature adult in all of this.
Wow, and it gets worse from there. I think Paul is smart to let Phil drag him on his own forum rather than let him go blow up on social media for getting banned.
still vague as hell lol
I need to see the photoshops!
My first thought was the same. I used to like Sparkfun but then they closed the source of some of their projects (while often "forgetting" to update their website to reflect that). I was concerned when I saw the headline but just assumed that Sparkfun was probably in the wrong even before I saw the comments.
Same. I was afraid that there was some bad egg that managed to get into Adafruit, or maybe someone was having a real bad day. You never know what kind of person someone is off camera, but Adafruit as a company has always managed to give off the most wholesome vibes.
I'll be interested to see how this unfolds. I have little skin in the game being mostly upstream of the supply chain, but I've had reason to purchase from both companies, and hope this doesn't blow up into a huge thing.
That was my first thought as well, especially given the accusation of code of conduct violation. Not that I think that Adafruit is perfect no matter what, but I would have been shocked if this turned out to be true as stated.
Yeah just to add to this pile, I've always found Adafruit to be one of the most reasonable companies in the space. I've been buying their products for a decade.
Reppin my free coaster and keeb board. Reminds me of Hitec who would send candy with their transmitters.
Also all their docs man great for noobs like me starting out and libraries.
Why is your "open source Teensy" [0] just an RP2350 on a Teensy shaped board?
In my book, what makes a Teensy a Teensy is 1) hardware support, like 600Mhz clock, CAN, FPU, RTC, other hardware peripherals which the RP2350 lacks and 2) software compatibility with Paul Stoffregen's well documented Teensyduino libraries. I would not buy something else if I needed these features.
Do you plan to do a port? Why not build around the same IMXRT1062? Are you barred from buying Paul's bootloader chips [1]?
[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
[1] https://www.pjrc.com/store/ic_mkl02_t4.html
hi, great question. we have to start with something and while the RP2350 is not going to beat a 600mhz m7 it is much less expensive, fast to get, has lots of nifty support libraries available, and will definitely do better than the teensy 3.2 which many folks loved so much (and was discontinued during the chip shortage). this is also a great time to add things that we always wanted in the teensy: SWD debug, built in 8 MB storage, lipoly battery charging, open source bootloader, open hardware design. stuff like CAN is supported via PIO (https://github.com/KevinOConnor/can2040), as is USB host on any two adjacent pins. M33 has FPU, and the dormant/RTC mode for the RP2350 is 10uA (see https://www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-pico/...). other 'teensiriffic' things like NeoPixel DMA support is well supported by PIO on the RP2350. as well as I2S audio.
as for the bootloader chip: we don't want to trade one closed-single-source component for another. if we're going to make something it should be fully open source as much as we can!
finally, for teensyduino libraries that you love: there's no reason they cant be ported (we did an audio port for the samd51) - which specific library are you referring to?
Thanks for the answer. I know many are scared off by the closed bootloader of the teensy (though I feel it's a fair thing to do). The lack of on-chip debugging is another shortcoming the Teensys have.
I've been working on an audio project recently, and the the ease of use and feature set that TeensyAudio has is incredible.
Teensy 4 does currently fill a pretty unique niche in terms of processing power though. There isn't much like it outside of professional eval boards.
> I know many are scared off by the closed bootloader of the teensy (though I feel it's a fair thing to do).
Why is it a fair thing to do?
I think this is a bit tone-deaf the reason why the teensy is so desirable is because of its raw power in such a neat package. The RP2350 is great but if I wanted that I would just purchase it rather than the Freensy
Right, but you're not really competing on processor speed. You're competing on maturity of peripherals where the RP doesn't really match up PIO or not.
Edit: I see you're comparing it to the 3.2 but I suspect most folks are going to be comparing your offering to the 4.x.
Yeah - I don't really consider this comparable for my uses which rely heavily on the DSP and processing power of the Teensy itself either.
Drama and whatnot aside I'm not really sure why anyone would buy the (considerably more expensive) Teensy over something RP based if RP was suitable for their needs already.
Interestingly despite being a Teensy fan I have found myself reaching more towards the RP when I can because I can't stand the Arduino API and much prefer the RP SDK. I do use Teensy without Teensyduino (Makefile based) and also a bit of the CMSIS-DSP stuff directly - but it's kinda clunky IMO.
I've been interested to hear more about use cases for these "hybrid" MCUs, can you share a bit about why you chose that over something like a Cortex-A running linux, or an SoC with -A and -M cores?
It's a good question - unfortunately I don't really have a good answer...
Almost all of my embedded activities are for a my own hobby purposes, and I just like the ability to go 'as low as I can' with projects on MCUs. It's nice to be able to use the device's peripherals as much as possible (hardware DSP etc) and I'm not confident in how I'd do that on a Linux based system. I'm in to building my own ham radio Software Defined receivers and it's nice to keep it completely real time.
If I were to be doing this stuff professionally (and I am very close to people who do at work) then yeah I'd probably be using Zephyr or something.
Ah interesting! I work on (very expensive) SDRs and we make pretty heavy use of Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale SoCs. They combine Cortex-A, Cortex-R, and FPGA fabric all in one package, with some fancy interconnects. So you can handle the hard realtime stuff on an RTOS or in the FPGA, then send the data over to the application processor with a hard float ALU to crunch some numbers (or build some kind of dsp IP into the FPGA, idk much about that side of it).
I've also seen some cool stuff with the BeagleBone products, which have a few TI custom architecture DSPs and "realtime units" which you can communicate with via Linux.
But yeah, I can certainly see how just doing it all on a super fast MCU could be easier and cheaper without the backing of commercial enterprises.
I've always thought it would be cool to design a "poor man's zynq" hat for a SBC. Stick a RP3050 and a Lattice FPGA on there and set up some SPI / UART connections.
it will have benefits over the 4.x - we can always spin up a version with the iMX chipset (we have a metro board with the little sister chip, iMX RT1011 already in stock) - tbh if we did something with the iMX RT106x we'd probably start with a Metro (Arduino-shield compatible) or Feather board since that's a super-popular pinout.
either way, more hardware is better and we don't want to just give people the same-old-same-old... as we mentioned there's lots of things that we can add to make the board useful to people: SWD, USB C, Lipoly batt, onboard storage, neopixel LED, etc). what peripheral/library are you specifically concerned about?
If you replace the Teensy 4.x it would have to be something very close to the same pinout, foot print, cost and features otherwise it would just be a new product. Ideally you would find a way to source the Teensy directly bypassing Sparkfun.
sparkfun is the single source supplier (and now maker of the product).
Yes, obviously, but they don't make the chips, so can't you just source the exact same chip, make thing pin compatible and call it a day? Then you'd have a drop in replacement, any changes you make will cause disruption for people downstream.
https://www.nxp.com/part/MIMXRT1062DVL6A
Spinning an IMXRT1062/IMXRT1064 design sans the terrible Teensy bootloader should take a day or two at most.
These chips have perfectly-fine ROM USB bootloaders and SWD, don't ruin them by adding extra garbage.
Mostly I'm just leery of software defined peripherals being at the mercy of whatever community springs up around them, nothing specific. In terms of a Metro then yeah, something to slot in where the Due was absolutely with high speed USB, 10/100 ethernet, CAN FD, and all that jazz that wouldn't work on a $10 board. A SAMV70 successor to the Due?
NXP just seems antithetical to an open platform. Then again Arduino went with Renesas, and they're… not great.
Otherwise it's the openness that would pique my interest. SWD headers, yes 100%. But also the documentation. No half-assed SVDs, buggy closed source flash algorithms (Microchip), wholly undocumented peripherals (looking at you Renesas), stuff like that.
All chip manufacturers are alike in this respect, unfortunately. That whole industry believes that they thrive on secrecy and that simply properly speccing their hardware would already be a massive competitive risk.
There is a place for a cheaper 5v tolerant microcontroller, but that’s more of a commodity space and probably not worth competing in for most.
It looks like it's just a set of bullet points on a forum thread, not anything like a final design, so go post that comment there.
> hardware support, like 600Mhz clock, CAN, FPU, RTC, other hardware peripherals which the RP2350 lacks
FWIW, those are all NXP-provided features on the chip, not something Sparkfun has any particular connection with. There are other iMX devices on the market, just not in this form factor. And there are other vendors with SoCs offering similar performance.
Really one of the biggest problems in this market is that everyone is putting the abstractions in the wrong place. We've all collectively decided that this stuff is scary and we need comforting IDEs and hardware uniformity to deal with it.
But... portable software and frameworks are hardly new ideas. Come over to Zephyr and see all the stuff you can run on boards from basically everyone, including NXP.
There's a lot more great hardware for your project than just Teensy, so stop locking yourself in.
Oh boy, just what we need. Drama between open hardware vendors. Neither of these responses feels like the complete story to me. I hope there's a path forward to heal this rift in one way or another. Both SparkFun and Adafruit are doing amazing things for the community and I would love to see both continue to thrive.
Note that Sparkfun has been less and less of an "open hardware" vendor, as they've dropped the open aspect on some of their most popular projects.
Seems to be the inevitable trend... Just in recent times: Pebble drama, Arduino joining the dark side, now Sparkfun & Adafruit. End of an era
we are sticking with open source, arduino has moved away from that and sparkfun has an open-source certification revoked due to not being open source.
What's the drama with Pebble? I thought everything was rosy since the reboot?
There was conflict between the new (old) hardware manufacturer Core Devices, and the Rebble community that's maintained the app store and software for the original Pebbles. I think they've worked it out, but it got ugly for a bit.
Do you have a response/explanation for the two specific accusations about forwarding inappropriate emails to sparkfun employees, and involving a customer with something?
Those seem extremely vague, but I didn't see them mentioned in the blog post.
It would be deeply funny if SparkFun was referring to Adafruit forwarding inappropriate emails written by SparkFun employees to SparkFun, in an attempt to report their harassment.
That is exactly how I understand it at the moment. And depending on the material, it would be a somewhat valid complaint, if the report included the material without prior warning. Though, not valid enough to call CoC on this, IMHO.
It would only be at all valid if it was forwarded to employees who weren’t in a customer facing role.
Saying that you’re required to give a content warning to an account manager for material related to your business relationship puts the burden of responsibility onto the victim. Dealing with the psychological impact is the responsibility of their employer, not the customer.
No, even in a customer-facing role, you won't have to put up with every s**. I mean, it's a business for electronics, not a porn-shop or moderation for explicit material at some social media-platform. There should be a line on what they have to tolerate.
From the little we know the "material" in question would be photoshops made to harass Limor, made by someone at sparkfun. So it would be weird for sparkfun to complain , given the content originated with one of their employees. (Allegedly)
Yeah this is how I read it as well.
>so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters..
one corporate side overshares by pointing fingers and accusing a different corporation...
so that corporation decides to be the better person, declare the opponent as weirdos, then proceed to point fingers at individuals instead for collective action from the public.
nice look, both groups.
Adafruit is in the wrong for not advocating for collective action from the public? I do not understand what exactly your argument is there.
Have you also been embargoed from buying shift keys?
I laughed way too hard at this. Also, I can't even read some of these statements with a straight face because all the project and company names sound completely ridiculous when placed in serious sentences, it's like reading about embezzlement charges for Sesame Street characters.
I needed a good laugh today and "reading about embezzlement charges for Sesame Street characters" gave me it, so: thanks!
Levar Burton did get into some hot water over the Reading Rainbow app.
Hah, really? He's a treasure, met him a few times at poetry readings and such. A quick search isn't bringing anything up but google has been failing me a lot lately. Or I'm failing at google a lot lately.
speech to text, with a newborn, replying to these and feeding her. i cannot purchase shift keys if they are on sparkfun, yes.
Weird that your STT doesn't handle capitals, but that's a good excuse. Sounds like you're having a challenging day, I hope my snarky joke wasn't too annoying.
> I hope my snarky joke wasn't too annoying
Don't worry, he always writes like this.
I think it's a trend among tech founders, I've seen some on Twitter doing it, and then a bunch of hanger-ons copying the behavior.
I think it goes back a lot further than Twitter.
As someone who hung out on IRC way back in the 1990s (and internet-knew Limor from Adafruit back before her handle was Ladyada) I associate this writing style with the culture of a lot of the hacker-related IRC channels I used to hang out in back then.
Some of the same people from that era did in fact turn out to be tech founders and maybe that's how it got carried over into the Twitter-verse, but it predates that.
Not just tech founders. Jeffrey Epstein writing is just atrocious. Like how does anyone habitually use a commas ,, like this?
I've heard it referred to as a "flex," basically doing something stupid to rub it in that you can get away with it.
Explanation: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
You’re right. Sam Altman does this and others repeat it like people used to wear black turtlenecks.
Adafruit is maybe an all time amazing success story built on giving more of a shit than anyone else. There is a direct through line from reading MAKE in high school through programming the 8 LED POV thing through the rest of my career. Limor doesn't answer a forum question on a Sunday morning in like 2008 and I don't make my mortgage payment this month and my son gets store brand formula. I wish you every success professionally and in this new chapter with your tiny miracle, and I hope for an amicable resolution to this whole Sparkfun thing.
Congratulations! (assuming you're the parent)
If not, congratulations on the heist.
Perhaps a foot pedal? Maybe Adafruit could make one.
What?
Your other posts have capital letters for technical abbreviations and "Sparkfun", but not for "I" and the first letter of sentences.
Sorry, from a bystander this looks like a straight-up lie, and why lie about such a small thing? It brings into question the truth of your other statements. Just say you like the style if that's the truth.
Looking at your comment history, it’s clear that you’re lying. You simply don’t care.
You are doing damage control on a public forum. Your writing should be precise and neat if you don't wish to appear unprofessional and goaded into responding. Normally, badly written prose is just annoying; here it is harmful to your cause.
valuing style over substance is folly.
It is clearly a deliberate choice to send the signal of conforming to a particular type of non-conformance. It’s a costly signal because most people will see it as having the emotional maturity of a child, it signals to others that given their social status they can afford that self imposed handicap.
Perhaps but in this case the style does make it harder to read the substance.
*poorly written prose
Typing in all lowercase makes you look more vulnerable, it's a pretty common rhetorical tactic in PR.
I had never noticed this before. Can you point at any examples?
I have long noticed high profile people going to court with some kind of cast on, though.
I heard that altman does it. I don't care about him enough to check though. More silly gimmicks like holmes talking in a mans voice or jobs wearing the same turtle neck
Agree, it makes it seem like the individual is "one of us" and that what they're saying is a little more raw/genuine.
"They're being mean to me." vs "theyre being mean to me".
Uh, no, it makes you look careless and unprofessional.
How it's perceived is no doubt in the eye of the beholder. I can totally see how some people would associate this writing style with children, and so associate it with "vulnerable".
I have no idea what any of this thread is about, but I'm sure the thing that I'm going to remember next time I need to buy something from one of these two is that one of them can be bothered to use capital letters, so I'll use them.
some of us are anti-capitalist
Appreciate the transparency! The one thing that doesn't quite add up for me is SparkFun accusing you of "involving a SparkFun customer" in the dispute. Can you comment on what that might be referring to?
probably mentioning on PJRC's forum they're making their own teensy compatible because sparkfun(Under contract by PJRC as the exclusive teensy manufacturer) cut them off.
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
This needs a response, and my opinion will certainly be up in the air until I hear an explanation (or lack thereof) from AdaFruit.
I am a lifelong Sparkfun and Adafruit customer, I grew up and went to engineering school just down the street from Sparkfun.
This event will cause me to no longer be a Sparkfun customer.
There is no one that I have more respect for in this world than limor. She has done more for this industry, education and open source than anyone alive.
What’s the deal with 5v, 3.3v and 24v “standards” for sensors? It seems like there are really three different markets and it sucks because crossing “lanes” is really annoying. I like how you all made the qwik connectors “just work”, but now that I’m trying more industrial stuff I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get my 24v world to play nicely with the 3.3v world but of course my 24v world only wants to do SPI over 5v.
Anyhoo, sorry we can’t just stick to the technical drama.
Those levels are based on the electronics themselves. Earlier circuits used TTL which needed higher voltages to signify a "High". Newer CMOS based electronics need less voltage.
Lower voltages help with power savings. Higher voltages can and do work better in high power, high noise environments though! 24V as you see is still very popular and useful inany applications.
great question! so historically microcontrollers (and sensors) were 5V 'CMOS' power and logic. this was way better than the up-to-12V for TTL logic but over time the desire for higher clock speeds / faster IO / lower power means the voltage needs to drop (since power = current * voltage lower voltage is lower power) the next voltage standard became 3.3V. these days, even 3.3V is a 'bit high' and we're seeing lots of device that are 1.8V or 1.65V or even 1.2V max (yeek!) one thing we do for all of our sensor breakouts is add level shifting up/down as necessary so they work with EITHER 5V older boards (yay no need to throw them out!) or with the newer 3.3V boards (woo forward compatibility) level shifting and regulation also reduces the risk of damage from over/under volting or plugging stuff in backwards. this is documented here: https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-adafruit-stemma-qt/st...
maybe someone from sparkfun could post advice for you here too...
Ooh thank you! I often forget that everything is a capacitor/resistor/inductor all at once and i see how at higher frequencies that starts to matter! I think the 24v stuff is also more low frequency signaling over longer distances so rise/fall time is less of a worry but voltage drop / noise is perhaps more of one. Thanks!
Fwiw, I’m team adafruit on this. Hope it works out for y’all
> What’s the deal with 5v, 3.3v and 24v “standards” for sensors?
Historical garbage and different manufacturing technologies. Be happy if you can get away with only 5V and 3V3 rails in your project. 24V is usually to interface with industrial sensors. And sometimes you see 12V as well, for stuff that's RS232 based.
And on top of that you got a fifth standard, 4..20 mA current loops. That one is used for long range transmission of analog values of a single sensor per wire pair, with 4-20 mA being seen as the value (4 mA = 0%, 20 mA = 100%), and anything less being seen as a cable break, anything higher as a short circuit somewhere.
4 to 20mA signaling is only the start of a very specific rabbit hole. Someone had the brilliant idea to encode digital signals on top of the analog current loop. The result is the HART communication protocol, which is old, bloated, confusing, quirky - and it is really popular in industrial automation.
don't forget 0-10v and 2-10v analog signals.
Ah yes, I was wondering why my ClearCore supported that, seemed oddly specific!
Wouldn't be the first time CoC was used as a lame attempt to harm open source.
Thanks for speaking up.
I find it weird to jump to this from the scarce information we have.
"Someone did a CoC violation" is just a way for an org to say "someone was an asshole to such an extent it was driving other people away or getting us into legal trouble", with the manner of assholery defined in the CoC. 9/10 times it is nothing sinister.
Of course right now we just don't know what happened.
The one thing I know is that for threads such as this one it is best to ignore all of the stuff from accounts made just for the purpose of participating in the thread.
In this case, given the topic of this thread is targeted harassment in response to public social media criticism, I think it's understandable that some folks might like to participate anonymously to avoid becoming a future target.
> I find it weird to jump to this from the scarce information we have.
If you look at how I worded my comment, you'll see I didn't jump to any conclusion. Only you have, apparently.
(edit: Also unsurprising to see your account is two days old)
Are you HR or something?
Nah but I recognize that HR, unfortunately, has to exist for larger organizations.
Unless you have an infinitely wise and patient dictator who can just say "you're an asshole, you go" and always make the right call or something.
Overall I think Code of Conducts are a net negative. Alleged violations of them seem to be used to lend credibility to actions that otherwise would be hard(er) to justify.
It just dawned on me that CoC docs are basically HR for open source. Point to a violation and voila, that person is gone. “Sorry, nothing personal, CoC violation, there’s nothing I can do”.
Exactly. Without a CoC the persons making hard decisions have to stand behind them. With a CoC they can hide behind the CoC and wash their hands in innocence. This lowers the barrier for making questionable decisions and overall decreases honesty. We've seen this with the suspension of Python core maintainer Tim Peters.
I had never heard of the Tim Peters incident, but I just googled it. (It's not on his Wikipedia page.)
I found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1ep4dbt/the_shamefu...
Which points to this:
https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...
This characterizes it as completely unfair, and the /r/python community seems to agree.
Is there a rebuttal from the other side?
Overall I wish we lived in a world where they are not needed. But in every community, some people are assholes so they are often needed.
Communities were doing just fine without a CoC up until they became a trend. People got banned too but the moderators couldn't hide behind a CoC to justify questionable decisions.
Communities were not doing fine. CoC didn't come out of nowhere because someone was bored. Having a CoC doesn't absolve moderators any more than having laws absolves judges from having to make good rulings.
> Communities were doing just fine without a CoC
I mean kinda, but also not. CoCs just codify what the moderators think.
Even Hacker news has a CoC: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html its just called a guide.
A community has to have a set of rules which most people agree on. One of the most common attacks in a moderated forum is "Oh but X did Y" and "thats not fair X can do it"
A CoC can be a simple way to "tap the sign" when someone is being a dick.
It also allows communities to set expectations at the start, not after someone has transgressed and pissed in the well.
In an ideal world, you'd just have a thing that says "don't be a dick" but that doesn't work for many and hilarious reasons. Engineers who who either have a god complex, parsing issues or empathy gaps (either learnt or inherent ) are notoriously difficult as a community to keep from getting into frothy arguments that colour everything and give off a bad smell.
CoCs are a tool, that can sometimes help.
I perceive "guidelines" or "rules" having a very different connotation compared to a "code of conduct."
See for, example, the SQLite team adopting the Rule of St. Benedict as their "Code of Conduct," getting criticized for it, and changing it to a "Code of Ethics" in accordance with the Rule about seeking accommodation with your adversaries.
It just means you get different kinds of assholes who are better at navigating around the CoC or even weaponizing it.
There are bad CoCs and ways to abuse them and people who do. That doesn't mean the concept of setting social expectations for a collaborative project is inherently bad. Same as for discussion forum guidelines and moderation.
No CoC is better than a bad CoC or one where interpretation is centralized to someone with an agenda. But many times a decent CoC can help newcomers in reading the room and support well-intended moderators in making judgement calls.
I also think good CoCs are small and mostly reactive. It's premature social engineering to spend energy on formulating general policies for things that happened once or twice if ever for the project.
Like, maybe wait until you actually had a couple of slop PRs before spending time, energy, and political capital on an AI contribution policy.
They're a weapon of "social justice" - 90% of CoC rules are common-sense stuff that doesn't have to be said, combined with one or two "progressive" ideas shoehorned in.
And "social justice" is often a weapon of capital interests in disguise.
I was once told I couldn’t present a calorie counting/diet app at an Elm conference because it violated their CoC about discrimination based on “body size”.
Mate, thats just rules. rules you don't agree with.
Often these "rules" extend to conduct far outside of the purview of a project - typically crossing into identity politics.
"If you espouse views I don't like on your personal Twitter, you can't contribute to this entirely unrelated software project."
This is like saying "overall laws are bad" because whoever is applying them is doing so maliciously. Even in the absence of COC companies like this always find a way to justify this sort of pressure. If not a COC, it's a TOS or NDA or whatever document acronym you can find.
This is nothing to do with Code of Conduct and just one business chosing not to do business with another.
Glad to hear that there will by an open source option. This honestly makes the Teensy/Freensy an option for me where before it wasn't.
Is there any thought to expanding the Freensy lineup beyond a pure clone?
No questions. Just move on. Engaging in public spectacle isn't a good look for anyone.
That's normally good advice, but this is a small enough niche that trust-in-brand matters a great deal. Right now AdaFruit is looking like the villain here. I think a little more transparency from them is a very good thing if they don't want to suffer massive brand damage.
Definitely avoid ad hominems, and focus purely on facts. Provide what information/evidence you can without violating agreements, but only if it's relevant to the situation and includes as much context as possible.
No in this case addressing the accusation is necessary.
I think what's currently been said is sufficient. You need to make a grown up version of the statement "None of that is true", but yes probably best to leave it at that.
Honestly, this being Adafruit, my default assumption is to believe them. Especially with this super vague "please read between the lines because if I actually say something false it'll be libel" accusation.
I understand selling the Teensy line is out of your control, but what does “support” mean exactly in this context? Will related materials stay on your site?
I really hope this doesn’t lead to “boycott” of Teensy per se. I completely sympathize with tensions running high but please reconsider for the good of the community.
Documentation yes, but also Adafruit has very active support forums where customers can ask questions which get answered either by the community, or Adafruit employees, or both.
If that's what they're referring to, then my question is why does that need to end?
I thought the Teensys were made by PJRC. and they seem to list a number of US distributors on their website still. (including adafruit)
Trying to parse as I am not in the know. Nate is Nate Seidle, CEO of SparkFun Electronics?
I know SparkFun recently took over Paul Stoffregen and Robin Coon's Teensy production (I reached out at the time and Paul said it was cool).
I'm guessing Adafruit got a special deal in purchasing Teensy's from SparkFun but because of an allegation made by you against Nate, they are responding by dropping your entire product line?
Anyway, good luck to everyone involved. It's a small community of companies that provide for makers.
I have feeling it will only hurt PJRC in the end for trusting sparkfun to sell and manage the teensy "brand"
Can't say I blame them though. Paul and Robin are two people. Sparkfun (and Adafruit) are massive by comparison and have big stores that sell the same sort of stuff in much higher volume. The Teensys are popular. Sparkfun does (or at least used to do) board assembly in-house. It seems like a perfect match on paper.
I am completely out of loop here. I think I may have heard about adafruit once.
Your comment seemed the most information to me (and thank you for that) but can you please sum up the whole controversy from what allegations were made and everything because I was sensing that adafruit was in the right earlier but (now I am not?)
I feel like I would benefit a lot if you can tell me the whole controversy if possible. Thanks in advance!
Hi phil, appreciate the supposed candor here. I'm just an uninvolved HN observer interested in piecing together all the details of this dispute, here are some follow-up questions:
- The first public claim is that you engaged in targeted social-media harassment of an individual ('discatte') [1], linking various personally-identifiable information to their public profile without consent (name, email and gmail profile pic), and further intentionally misgendering/dead-naming them after being made aware that this was harmful. Do you have any sort of public response to these claims, denying or apologizing for this behavior?
- The second public claim is that the email report you sent to Sparkfun [2] was not simply a 'report' of harassing actions, but itself crossed the line into further harassing behavior ('hi jerks', 'you monsters', etc). Did you really, as claimed, copy the former employee's fiancee's current employer in these email threads as well? Any other context on why this unrelated employer needed to be brought into your dispute?
- Not only SparkFun, but it appears you were also banned from Fossoton [3] for CoC violations related to the dispute with discatte, correct? Any other context on this ban?
- It appears that you also sent another user harassing messages to their Etsy account [4] after objecting to your 'doxxing' of discatte's personal information and blocking you elsewhere, and they reported to you Etsy's trust and safety team. Any other context on this separate incident of alleged harassment?
[1] https://digipres.club/@discatte/115600253924804026
[2] https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...
[3] https://gist.github.com/NPoole/8e128edb6e32986755450da9285b5...
[4] https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220
What are the impacts if any to the Stemma QT and Quiic ecosystems?
This post is not a good look. You come off as quite snide. In particular, things like "Sparkfun will not?", calling a CoC concern a weirdo behavior, responding to harassment allegations by saying the did it first.
This seems very much like two businesses experiencing friction and separating, which happens all the time. You coming in and framing the flames makes doesn't scan particularly positively to me.
Looks like you guys are handling it right from a consumer standpoint. Thanks for letting us know and for not playing the fingerpointing game in public. Looks like you're not playing at all and just moving on. Nice.
The post you are replying to literally is playing the finger pointing game. They level accusations right back at spark fun.
I have zero skin in this game, and personally think the right move is for Adafruit to simply say, "We wish Sparkfun the best of luck" and move on, but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.
> "We wish Sparkfun the best of luck"
This would mean admitting the allegations are 100% true and harming their business even more with the risk of losing it all in worst case. Now we can assume it's not as simple as SparkFun makes it. It's a dirty situation, but necessary, and justified if they are really a victim.
> but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.
SparkFun started the war, AdaFruit seem to only defend here.
Links to "hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment"?
Why do I need to prove I'm human to read your blog?
Can't speak specifically for this site, but these days many prove-you're-human tests have been added because of overzealous AI scraping eating server resources unnecessarily and to an unreasonable and excessive degree.
Because AI scraping is everywhere and flooding sites with useless traffic. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best people can do atm
"It's not ideal" is an understatement, I have to do stupid captchas for about half my Google searches.
What kind of blog gets flooded by what, 10/100 req/s at max? Seems somewhere along the line we forgot how to deploy and run infrastructure on the internet, if some basic scrapers manage to down your website.
Because of enshitification of the internet you now need to solve puzzles before you can access websites. Welcome to 2026.
I'm not sure I can trust someone who seems completely oblivious to capital letters.
To publish such a vague statement is an obvious invitation for speculation. It seems like rather questionable behaviour itself from spatkfun.
The fact that they mention a "private matter" makes me think this is some petty personal grievance that has somehow escalated to this.
While SparkFun may feel entitled to air their grievances as an "Official response", these types of public statements aren't productive for business nor useful/respectful to consumers.
Public notices for the consumer should serve the consumer. I.e. they should only relate to matters that directly concern them, such as notice of availability, warranty, support or the fulfilment of other consumers' rights. Those statements should be unambiguous and not allude to blame or personal tiffs.
While Sparkfun's statement touches on availability it merely does so as a vehicle for grandstanding and retaliation through gossip and drama. The fact that SparkFun notes it's a "private matter" yet chose to involve the public also makes SparkFun look unprofessional, even if they are 0% at fault for the circumstances.
Consumers put their trust in a company, it is disrespectful of that trust when trying to embroil them in personal affairs, they never agreed to that.
What would you have them publish instead? Your curiosity does not overcome the right to privacy of those involved.
> What would you have them publish instead?
The statement that is published places blame, if not accusations of criminal behaviour, on their business partner.
IOW, they already overshared with the intent of damaging the reputation of their business partner.
In my mind, they are already behind; had they released the standard business line "Our relationship with $X has come to an end; we apologise for any inconvenience caused" I wouldn't be so quick to judge them.
But, now I *am judging them, because they clearly felt personally aggrieved by what happened, enough to imply the worst without actually coming out and saying what happened.
nobody wants corporate speak. They are saying they are cutting ties and it's not their fault. No harm in that if it's true.
> No harm in that if it's true.
Same as saying "Behringer is a convicted paedophile": no harm if it's true, right?
Are you saying they're lying? That's a different issue than what I understood him to mean "it's unprofessional". It's flat out illegal.
There certainly could be harm if it's false though, which is the whole point. And they did not give any information to affirm who's fault (if anyone) it was besides hearsay
that's not the point as far as I can tell. The parent was saying the remarks were oversharing, not false.
I would rather they published nothing. There is no need to make any of this public. Just stop selling Adafruit products and stop selling to Adafruit. If anyone asks, then you can say "we don't do business with them any longer". The public doesn't need the rationale.
That's it. Everything else is dragging the community/customers into a fight that they didn't ask for.
> What would you have them publish instead?
Is there any duty to publish anything? They could release nothing, or nothing with any details, if they have some obligation.
Yes, but Sparkfun didn't "release nothing", and now they are opening themselves up to a libel suit.
It would have been far better had they not published anything at this point.
Nothing, you either want to talk about a problem or not. Throwing vague, empty claims is just a cheap attack on other's company public image
Something more concrete like "on Tuesday at 9pm an adafruit employee sent an aggressive email which violated our COC by calling one of our employees a 'stupid fuckface'".
I don't think that level of detail would be a privacy violation legally and imo not morally either
Nothing. They could just cut ties and be done with it.
It seems like releasing more would have probably broken the exact same rules they are claiming AdaFruit broke.
> Your curiosity does not overcome the right to privacy of those involved.
I agree in principle, but is there an actual right to privacy in this instance?
I'm asking this in the legal sense, not a moral sense.
There is no right to privacy, but they may have an NDA. Also, if they get too specific, they could open themselves up to a libel lawsuit. Though, if they were consulting a lawyer I don't think there would be any release. Simply cut business ties, and move on, it happens all the time, and would leave room to patch things up later.
"they could open themselves up to a libel lawsuit."
They already have.
I think in this case it would be Defamation. But the claim is generic enough to be provable (ie private matter, private emails, CoC violation)
Libel is a type of defamation. Just to be pedantic.
If you can't publish a complete, detailed, specific description of what you're alleging, with names, dates, quotes, and whatever, then you publish absolutely nothing. Publishing vague and unanswerable accusations is scumbag behavior.
Don’t attention whore on the internet if you want privacy.
Yes. They really should have just put a notice up that they're no longer distributing AdaFruit products and direct people to Adafruit website.
I'm still trying to put all the pieces together, but https://digipres.club/@discatte/115588660312186707 sure paints Adafruit as the bad party here, though I'm open to information which shows otherwise to understand better.
This adds some more context I guess https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877
Honestly the whole thing seems like everyone overreacting on both sides. Accusing someone is "doxing" because they used your first name?
The collections of threads, statements, and accusations on both sides are some of the most unhinged things I have seen in a while, and I don't think any of this helps anyone. :')
I believe they are claiming doxing based on connecting an email to a social media account.
Isn’t that a built in feature of most social media platforms?
Consensually, typically.
I don't have a bone in this race, but if someone has deliberately hidden their identity online, knowingly disclosing that is malicious, regardless of any other morality involved.
Consider people who have their public persona very deliberately obfuscated, like Banksy, or Chuck Tingle - it's very intentional that both of them do not disclose that, and if you found out either of their legal names, and disclosed it publicly, it would be with deliberate intent to subvert them.
Or consider if someone posted online they had a beer, and they lived somewhere that considered that an egregious crime even if they did it somewhere that it was legal. If you deliberately released proof that the person posting "I had a beer" was this person, it would have malicious intent, regardless of how you feel about the morality of beer.
Buried in there is the Sparkfun guy did in fact register a vanity domain and stand up a site for the purpose of harassing the Adafruit guy.
Kind of shitty to play the victim at that point.
correct "the Sparkfun guy did in fact register a vanity domain and stand up a site for the purpose of harassing"
From the screenshots posted, you seem to be doing significantly more harassing. Or are those all fake?
People seem to throw the words "doxxing" and "harassing" very lightly these days, if you ask me, although I'll give that nobody in this whole mess seems to be capable of calm or even non-violent communication.
Reading this, it looks like everyone needs a break.
This whole thing just seems like two terrible people being terrible to each other and both vying for sympathy to be the less terrible person in this.
That looks like the usual social media victim style posting.
I read a bunch of the relevant social media posts and emails and concluded that all parties are acting deeply childishly.
Nate shouldn’t have made a website with a domain name with Phil’s name and photoshopped meme, and brought it back up on social media years later.
Phil shouldn’t have been so aggressive in emailing Nate’s and his wife’s employers.
Sparkfun shouldn’t have overreacted by cutting off ties with Adafruit.
The URL for this page is very generic and bound to become a 404 page. Thinking about URLs is important to prevent link rot.
Sparkfun redid their site a couple years ago and nuked the links to all product pages of retired products too. A shame. I found someone's archive of the old site at one point, but I've since misplaced it.
Agreed. Because of this (and regardless), archive everything:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260114140733/https://www.spark...
The URL for this page is clearly a knee-jerk reaction. I don't expect it will survive the week.
Almost like it's by design.
Gotta love corporate skub fights. Honestly neither side is coming out looking good here.
If you’re not doing business with someone anymore, just drop their products. You don’t owe folks an explanation other than “unfortunately we do not carry that product anymore.”
It’s not just carrying their products. They are the exclusive producer of Teensy boards and are distributing them to many resellers but not to Adafruit.
Okay? That’s entirely their choice though. A supplier can absolutely cut off a reseller for whatever reason they want to, and no explanation is needed from either party. All I’m seeing from both sides is some attempt to “get ahead of” the other’s discourse, which is just resulting in a Streisand effect that makes both look bad to different degrees.
The only winning move is to just shut the f*k up and move on.
Are you one of those pro-skub hooligans?
https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/
I can't comment on this matter because I don't know the details. However, based on my personal experience consuming Adafruit products and their generous open-source approach, I personally trust Adafruit very much.
Ok, so what's the drama? Because it's obvious that there was some drama there: "inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter," "Responding and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material."
My guess is someone was trying to hit on someone and got mad when they were rejected.
This post [0] suggests that leadership at SparkFun has been engaged in a long term harassment campaign targeting the founder of AdaFruit (Limor Fried) using company resources, and is allegedly using their CoC as a smokescreen to cover up their own bad behavior and cast blame on the victim.
[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
Yeah but this post is not necessarily the truth. This person has ahem interesting history. https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877
I don’t know what’s going on, but I checked what Teensy is up to these days and it seems that last March they decided to outsource manufacturing and direct sales to SparkFun:
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sparkfun-to-manufac...
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.
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).
Product support, documentation, comparability, and community support/forums
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).
> 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.
I think that there might be a tad of seasonal depression affecting them here. My initial reaction was basically excitement at the drama, but then I remembered that I need to take my vitamins.
It's sad to see two good companies go at it, but I do like the reminder that they are run by actual humans with emotions. This is why we support independent businesses instead of corporations that act like they are run by robots, and likely will be run by robots soon.
I have always supported Adafruit -- Limor's principles shine through in the products, the website, the tutorials, and in the long-term track record of standing by their products. Even when I can source things from AliExpress, I often get them from Adafruit.
Speaking for myself, SparkFun has lost me as a customer.
Hmm... reads a bit like an email a forum moderator might send a disobedient user. This seems strange, verging on unprofessional, for corporate communications.
I miss the days when we would get Ruby Drama like this every week.
Those guys migrated to Rust and are too busy pleasing the borrow checker now
Until they there's a post about Zig/C/C++ and they come out of the woods asking why it wasn't written in Rust.
It's not clear from the top posts here what on Earth is happening. I've been a longtime customer of both Sparkfun and Adafruit for my kids. What do I need to know?
Obviously given the lack of information (maybe for the best?) there's nothing really to comment on when it comes to the allegations
However, I do wonder what this will mean for Adafruit product availability in Europe, as most stores I know of that sell Adafruit products here are Sparkfun distributors.
One of four possible outcomes:
- This blows up in Sparkfun’s face and they lose sales for not having Adafruit so they invite them back. Or Adafruit apologies and comes back.
- Adafruit is forced to become their own distributor and be a Sparkfun.
- Adafruit finds another distributor willing to go to battle with Sparkfun.
- Adafruit is no longer available in Europe.
I actually have a small lot of the Teensy boards for a USB hardware hacking project I was running for a while. For example, I used them to emulate a USB keyboard to automatically press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in Path of Exile over and over to avoid wrist strain during a time in that game where every player needed to constantly hit those keys in a loop to play at decently high levels.
These boards were an endless nightmare to work with. I had to cycle through many different USB controllers and it was really more like voodoo. I tried buying a few boards from different suppliers and every board had the same voodoo so I gave up and moved on.
I ended up getting ATtiny85 to work for what I wanted which sucked too, but at least it worked and was a fraction of the price so I could actually send them to all my friends.
Tbh I think both of y'all are a boon to people mucking about with hardware and that petty arguments, MBA parasite stuff, etc is all counterproductive but fight all you like.
I stopped buying stuff from SF/AF ages ago as I find it all overpriced for the most part (for my use cases). But then again I've not been doing too many hardware projects recently anyway.
Odd situation tho, both have been bastions of this stuff since forever.
Nice take on creating a thread about freensy on SparkFun's own forum!
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
Incredible how Adafruit-sided this discussion is, having seen ptorrone serially creating alt accounts fediverse to harrass people who thought that his behavior was bad [1], going as far as to harrass people on their Etsy stores [2]. I do not expect anything he says to be truthful at all, after having seen how much abuse he spews out.
[1]: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/115605021402124429 [2]: https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220
i asked if the person was going to "dox" me if i purchased a sticker that was in my cart already. there are multiple people making accounts using my handle, so i'm now on a server where there is some due process before fake reports or others pretending to be me.
As an uninformed observer, here is a possible sequence of events that sounds somewhat plausible based on what we know so far:
Honestly, if I received an email like this from the MD of a customer, I'd probably want to wash my hands of them as well
https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...
Ah, that is pretty illuminating. Insert “adafruit employee / husband of CEO overreacts to internet squabbles and gets a little shrieky because he’s sleep deprived” in there somewhere.
This reminds me of the olden days of small messageboard drama. It’s a shame to see it affect a business relationship between two good companies. Maybe they’ll make up after it all cools off.
sparkfun will continue to use limor’s open source code, libraries, and designs. that is how open source works, and we are fine with that, and that is awesome!
what is not speculation is - paul (teensy creator) told us directly that sparkfun’s decision to block us from purchasing teensy was final. that was not a heat of the moment thing, and it was not handled through normal purchasing channels. i do not even purchase. our purchasing team does. the same is true of the royalty payments sparkfun has made to adafruit for over a decade under standing agreements. there is essentially no day to day interaction. i asked if they are going to keep paying those, no reply yet.
the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute.
no current sparkfun employee did anything wrong here. one former employee did, and nate’s behavior toward limor has been an issue for years. i am done with that and him, so that part will sort itself out now.
> the termination letter was addressed broadly to “adafruit leadership,” not to any specific operational contact. that alone tells you this was not a routine business dispute
That really doesn’t tell me anything. I would like to humbly suggest you’re very close to this issue, in an already stressful personal situation, and you’re reading things between the lines kind of aggressively and overreacting.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and I’m not saying whatever others did is ok, but I am saying that you aren’t improving anything by being here trying to litigate your case. I don’t think anyone who puts any thought into this can legitimately accuse you of anything except getting a little too worked up about it.
Respectfully, go take care of your family.
it seems like if i do not reply, it's worse? i totally get what you are saying, however i think we're part of this hackernews community too, and not here to litigate past issues, and i will probably always get a little too worked up when it comes to what i believe is a long history of a "competitor" doing things outside of "it's just business, get thicker skin" ...
> it seems like if i do not reply, it's worse?
Yes, it really does seem that way to you. But only to you. :)
That's not necessarily correct. If you leave something standing without gainsaying it there is a substantial fraction of the viewers of the interaction who will come away with the impression that that party that did not speak up against the last comment lost the discussion because they ran out of arguments. This is so widespread that there are multiple names for the phenomenon and lots of good interaction has been ruined by it.
Can't help but read that and think, "And Nick thinks this email chain makes HIM look like the reasonable person?"
What am I missing about Nick's behavior that is unreasonable?
Setting aside any concept of who's "right" or "wrong", if I got an email like this from the MD of a customer, I'd share it with my team, we'd all laugh a bit, take a deep breath, and find a way to de-escalate the situation.
Similarly if I were buying product from a supplier and they made an immature joke I found hurtful, I would probably just ignore it. If it was a recurring problem maybe I'd say "I really didn't appreciate when you <xyz>'d, can we keep this focused on business in the future?" And if that didn't solve things, I'd see if someone else could be assigned to handle the account.
I hope those examples don't minimize what either side is feeling, but I have to say that I don't feel I've seen anything in this thread that gets my blood pumping. Dealing with difficult or rude people is part of the job and part of life.
Taking things personally, especially in business, is a _very_ expensive luxury. And if that isn't convincing enough, if you still feel angry about it in a month you can usually yell at them later. But if you escalate today and feel foolish about it later, it's a lot more difficult to mend the wounds.
Are these all teenagers?
I tried to parse the history and it goes back to 2021 and apparently touches upon pronouns, NFTs, online unmasking and various online battles around the same. Sigh. Can we put this HN thread out of its misery, please?
Wait, does this mean that all adafruit items for sale on sparkfun.com are going to be on a clearance sale?
No, it means anything they haven't shipped by the end of the day is being cancelled as an order. So I'm guessing they have very little inventory in stock or adafruit is contractually required to buy it back.
"Existing inventory will be sold through while supplies last. Once inventory is exhausted, no additional units will be restocked. We have put the remaining stock on sale." https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...
The question was about Adafruit products on Sparkfun. This answer is about Teensies on Adafruit.
Looks to me like they'll just dispose of the stock and not sell it.
"Existing inventory will be sold through while supplies last. Once inventory is exhausted, no additional units will be restocked. We have put the remaining stock on sale." https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...
"Existing inventory will be sold through while supplies last. Once inventory is exhausted, no additional units will be restocked. We have put the remaining stock on sale." https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...
That's the opposite, but also cool.
> We have put the remaining stock on sale.
Looks like the prices of Teensy boards on adafruit.com are the same as before. Maybe the statement means they will continue to sell them instead of "on sale" in the sense of applying a discount.
For context: This post by ptorrone suggests that leadership at Sparkfun has been engaged in a long running harassment campaign against the founder of AdaFruit (Limor Fried) and is now attempting to weaponize their CoC to cast blame on the victim in order to deflect from their own behavior[0].
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...For more context: There's also social media posts accusing ptorrone of engaging in harassment campaigns against other people.
I am unsure of the impact of this to the regular consumer as this seems like a pretty niche area. But it's kinda shitty that interpersonal relationships of two companies are impacting their customers negatively.
The onus is not up to public opinion or customer politics to resolve your schoolyard differences. We just want to buy your products and not get loaded with baggage. We don't owe you loyalty on top of the price we paid you for the product.
It's a bad look for the parties involved.
Obviously we don't know details, and Phil has made an effort at responding. However, both statements are (deliberately?) vague, and Sparkfun's CoC is laughably short. I am all for the rules being "Don't be a dick" but such vagaries can hide arbitrary decisions. All the vagaries amount to "trust me, bro" statements and when two well loved groups (AdaFruit/Sparkfun) square up in a game of trust everyone loses, at least in the short term.
Hopefully this gets cleared up one way or another, in a clear way that means we won't be re-litigating this for the next decade.
> Sending and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material to SparkFun employees, former employees and customers
> Inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter
Well those are fun accusations. Looking forward to adafruit response. Anyone has any context?
Keep in mind adafruit and sparkfun are business competitors. Not saying either is lying but statements need to be examined carefully. For what it's worth I've purchased from both many times and was always happy customer so this is sad to see.
Adafruit's response seems to be here: https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-... (via https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens... )
> in july, we [Adafruit] told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order. for years, sparkfun's leadership ignored specific behavior from leadership (and employees, now former... they had created and promoted hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment targeting limor, me, and others at adafruit. this was done on company time, shared, promoted. this was reported to them. it was documented and ignored. that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_
> months later in 2025, the same individual resurfaced and re-promoted it with what appears to be nate's blessing at the time. we again told sparkfun to deal with this. instead of addressing the behavior, sparkfun’s response was to “ban” adafruit from purchasing teensy by invoking a vague, secret set of rules that neither we nor paul (the creator of teensy) were allowed to see.
> this is not a one-off. nate (the founder of sparkfun) has done this before. anyone who has worked with him long enough knows this is how conflict is handled: deflect, escalate, and try to punish rather than deal with the underlying conduct.
That certainly doesn't come off well for SparkFun.
C’mon people, act like adults. Your community and your customers care far less than you think.
If truly inexcusable behavior has ensued, there are better ways to handle it. An entire profession exists to resolve them.
The only thing this public dispute tells me is I should never do business with either organization. What is with childish adults dragging "drama" into the public spotlight? What is a "Code of Conduct".
I would have privately let them know we arent going to supply them anymore and wish them the best. That's it.
Public drama is DISGUSTING!
Right, then why are you publicizing / dramatizing your own disgust?
tu quo que
I'm not condemning public drama. I support public drama. I'm questioning you, specifically.
ok
Are you going to answer the question?
Yet another open source drama fest. Can’t be bothered. I’ll buy the best product at cheapest. I can use two stores.
Quite frankly, whenever I see people going the public CoC accusation route instead of talking things out man-to-man or simply parting ways politely, I see man children who never learned to resolve problems in a mature manner without running off to get Mom.
Why publish this publicly? Now I wonder what really happened.
The SparkFun folks are cool. Back when I was a broke college student, they sent me free electronics kits. I massively respect them for that.
I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.
> Why publish this publicly?
I'm guessing to get ahead of any sort of speculation on why Sparkfun stops carrying their products? Perhaps also to get ahead of Adafruit publishing a similar public statement with more/conflicting details?
Hmm, but the accusations are so vague that it's going to be even more speculation, don't you think?
Yes, and that speculation is going to be entirely around "what did adafruit do" and not "what did sparkfun do".
There is no such thing as bad publicity...
> I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here.
You don't actually know that for a fact.
I suspect they made this public because many customers will notice that they are no longer carrying Adafruit products. I respect both companies greatly and have purchased from them in the past. It will be interesting to see what happened, if that is made public.
Yeah, what a weird turn of events. I have a tub of random little boards and kits from Adafruit... and the same from Sparkfun.
Next we'll see Waveshare and Seeed Studios have a go? Strange happenings.
> I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.
This aspect is not very surprising, it is usually moral high grounders who end up found to be doing something wrong, people like to compensate and try to put down others when they know they are in the wrong.
Why there is often so much drama whenever something open source or community is involved? The best we've got from the industry so far was Astronomer affair.
It's just a selection effect, the culture of openness means you are much more likely to see the drama.
That said, why does the Musk vs. Zuckerberg cage fight beef not spring to mind? Or Musk beefing just about any random day anyway?
Not to mention the whole "OpenAI going full corpo" drama, that was arguably a much bigger deal, something actually important instead of this small social media debacle.
Ok, ok, I exaggerated. But still, communuty is small, and the industry is big, and drama seems to be handled very differently in both
The inevitable speculation will occur, in which I have no useful insight.
I will say adafruit have clearly been heading in a bit of the wrong direction lately. See the misleading noise about arduino, for example. Have to wonder if the whole tariff situation is hurting them and it is causing these ripples.
I did check on archive.org, and the code of conduct is there on March 2025. So they didn't just add it in the last month or so, and then send this notice.
From the Code of Conduct:
> Unacceptable behaviors include but are not limited to: offensive comments, insults, jokes or ridicule; gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior in spaces where they are nor other unappropriately aggressive behaviors; threats of violence or deliberate intimidation; creating additional online accounts in order to harass another person or circumvent a ban; harassment of any form.
I can't help but wonder who decided that, in an electronics forum of all places, *any* form of joke should be unacceptable, but sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic!
The image would have to be topical, and the sexual nature would have to be necessary (not-gratuitous) for it to be compliant with that CoC.
I'd be surprised if such an image can exist in an electronics forum because those parameters are pretty narrow. I also don't interpret policy as disallowing any form of joke.
I'm not about to go hunting, but I think I would find a good number of good non-offensive jokes, and probably no instances of sexual imagery.
Commas are akin to thing(1|2|3) sometimes.
So it's offensive comments, offensive insults, offensive jokes, etc, as I read it, with ; breaking the association.
You're absolutely correct and it's me who has mis-read that part. The point of the oddly relaxed wording on sexual images and behaviour still stands though!
Offensive sexual images and behavior would fall under the first clause.
Then you’re left with the “my tasteful nudes aren’t offensive” defense to which the response is “but they are off topic”.
Presumably that means your biometric sensing vibrator hacking tutorial is still legal.
The list is supposed to be read as "offensive jokes", not any joke at all.
It's so the wrong opinion can be selectively enforced against.
> sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic
Well if someone was working on something like a medical device there might be some documentation that could be interpreted as sexual but that documenting it was not gratuitous.
Just guessing it's to cover pictures of electronic projects involving body parts that are normally covered and/or risque attire?
We live in an age of sex perverts who want their perversity affirmed.
Dig under all of this garbage and all you'll find is a few employees mad about their gender or something. What a waste of everyones time involved.
In this case I didn't even bother checking which side made the crime of not being leftist enough..