> because I can't believe Adafruit of all organizations is in the wrong here.

I've been hearing about this drama through a group chat for a long time. To be honest, neither side looks good in this one. Both companies have behaved disappointingly at different times for different reasons. I'm not doing this is an arbitrary "both sides" dismissal. There have been actions from both companies that would have been unacceptable in isolation.

The OSHW world revolves a lot around conferences, social media, and IRC/Matrix/Discord servers. Not coincidentally, this feels a lot like old IRC and forum drama of years past.

See additional context for the accusation(s) here[0].

[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

Adafruit is in the wrong for not advocating for collective action from the public? I do not understand what exactly your argument is there.

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.

speech to text, with a newborn, replying to these and feeding her. i cannot purchase shift keys if they are on sparkfun, yes.

Typing in all lowercase makes you look more vulnerable, it's a pretty common rhetorical tactic in PR.

some of us are anti-capitalist

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.

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.

phil has shifted toward garnering favor of the inpending ai revolution recreational use of capitalization and punctuation has historically been a game for the monkeys with fixation on unneeded use of their meat sticks casting off this vestige of conformance will be seen by our new overlords as subtle praise

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

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 have feeling it will only hurt PJRC in the end for trusting sparkfun to sell and manage the teensy "brand"

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!

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.

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.

I don’t know what’s going on here but it is super funny to link to [2] and only quote “hi jerks”

> nick has been telling people about the grand old time you two had at limor’s expense, my expense, and others. he says you sat around making memes about us, registering domains, the whole thing.

> you removed [limor’s] name on code. you scraped our site until it crashed and then emailed to get unblocked so your team could keep using our guides. you squatted on the adafruit name for usb stuff. that’s just a sample of the greatest hits. can you "compete" without doing this? did it even work?

user: xyzzyxy created: 2 hours ago ... ok, so you created it for this...

the individual you reference had already been removed from multiple retro and maker communities prior to this dispute for documented behavior. i contacted them privately using an email address they themselves used on the site they used, specifically to ask for a stop to the pile-on and to see whether there was a constructive way to resolve their grievance. their email included their first name, which i used in direct reply. there was no campaign, no public exposure of private information, and no intent to harm. labeling that interaction as “doxxing” is a distortion that collapses any private contact into wrongdoing.

with respect to sparkfun, yes, i sent a direct email to the founder, and ceo (and contacts i have there) calling out what i believe is a long-standing bully culture tolerated at the top. calling a company out for behavior is not harassment, even when the language is blunt. during this same period, fake accounts using my handle appeared and mass-reporting was clearly underway. my real account was likely caught up in that. retroactively attributing moderation actions for saying their first name on their email is inaccurate.

the various bans you cite did not occur after some calm, independent review of facts. they occurred in the middle of coordinated reporting, they said so.

as for etsy, i asked a seller who was publicly accusing me of “doxxing” a question: would placing an order would expose my personal information? that was it, there was a sticker in my cart already, i know this maker's work. etsy declined to take action that i know of, i just an etsy order, no ban (i did not buy the stickers). recharacterizing that as harassment is another example of inflation through repetition.

what your summary consistently excludes is the long, documented history of nate’s behavior and the impact it has had on employees, collaborators, and partners over many years. i dealt with that for a decade. i am not doing that anymore. drawing a line cost us purchasing a closed source board that only sparkfun makes, so we're doing an open source version.

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

Because of enshitification of the internet you now need to solve puzzles before you can access websites. Welcome to 2026.

> 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.

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.

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, 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

Nothing. They could just cut ties and be done with it.

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.

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.

Don’t attention whore on the internet if you want privacy.

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.

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.

Nah, just a spectator.

Want some popcorn while we watch? It’s kind of nice seeing a rerun of classic drama given-

gestures vaguely

…stuff.

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.

Is "by design" supposed to imply a negative scheming aspect, or am I reading too much into your comment? This page won't really be relevant to anything after a couple months, so if the link breaks I don't think there's a big problem.

Yeah but this post is not necessarily the truth. This person has ahem interesting history. https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877

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.

Adafruit products work as advertised, and are very well documented. Sparkfun is similar though their level of documentation is (IME) a bit more hit and miss.

For rando parts you get from rando vendors, it’s pretty common for schematics to have mistakes, pulldown resistors to be kind of off, and other components to be low quality.

For prototype development work, I’d rather spend a few dollars to have reliable parts that can be easily reordered than spend hours or days tracking down issues in parts that can’t always be reordered.

For post-prototyping and production work, you’re probably spinning boards anyway, and your choices and risks are pretty different.

For me, it's the Teensy 4.x boards. I have uses that consume all of their horsepower. I'm just a researcher, and my prototypes will be commercialized by an engineering team that will use the same microcontroller but on their own board and developed under their preferred auspices.

It's the closest I can get to an FPGA within my skill set.

Also, I think that Paul has been exemplary in his contributions to the open source community despite his own product having a closed component.

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.

Adafruit in particular is very good at providing step by step tutorials on how to use their products, most of them that are nontrivial have a little example project to go with them.

It's also been a good one-stop shop, if you want a little character display to go with your esp32 project they will have one, along with addressable LEDs, battery circuitry, etc.

It's a bummer both sites are melting down

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.

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.

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.

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.

Can't help but read that and think, "And Nick thinks this email chain makes HIM look like the reasonable person?"

Are these all teenagers?

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 asked if the person was going to "dox" me if i purchased a sticker that was in my cart already.

That implies you asked this of some random Etsy seller you happened to be interested in purchasing a sticker from, due to general privacy concerns. However, as I understand it, you instead tracked down the Etsy store of someone who had criticized and blocked you on social media, specifically to send them further unwanted messages related to your previous conversation about "doxxing" another user. Is this correct?

> 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.

Nick cited [1] specific since-suspended fediverse accounts linked to you: @ptorrone@fosstodon.org, @ptorrone@toot.community, @ptorrone@cyberplace.social, @ptorrone.bsky.social, @ptorrone@mastodon.nu. Are you denying involvement with those specific alt accounts, or just vaguely suggesting there might be other impersonators out there?

[1] https://chaos.social/@North/115602127173454774

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 CoC section seems to have been added sometime between Apr 8 and May 18, 2022 and unchanged since then.

"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.

Ok, ok, I exaggerated. But still, communuty is small, and the industry is big, and drama seems to be handled very differently in both

That certainly doesn't come off well for SparkFun.

Hmm, but the accusations are so vague that it's going to be even more speculation, don't you think?

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.