Both companies are pretty small and presumably exist because their owners are passionate about hobby electronics. Honestly, I'd rather have companies like that ran by (flawed) humans than by PR robots.

If they want to air their dirty laundry in public, I'm happy to grab popcorn and watch. I'm honestly shocked by the number of folks on this thread who don't know the specifics, and most probably never even bought anything from Sparkfun or Adafruit, but still want to condemn one of the companies in the strongest possible terms...

Thanks for the message. Which IRC channel should I join?

My take away from this link is not what Adafruit probably wants.

> we told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order

> that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_

You don't tell or demand another company do something with their own employees. There's more professional ways of dealing with a situation like this.

Request a meeting. Send a calm, collected, professional email to a decision-maker and be sure it's well sourced and factual. Keep things in private.

If the other party decides not to take action, then make a decision if you want to continue doing business with them. Do not keep pressuring them for the outcome you want, do not escalate the situation, and certainly don't drag the dirty laundry out into the public.

Like, what good did Adafruit actually think was going to come from getting into a fight with the founder of Sparkfun? 50 lashings with a wet noodle?

Whatever Sparkfun allegedly did to cause this, Adafruit looks pretty poor in this light. I've been a long time customer of both Adafruit and Sparkfun, and will continue to be - but this is some rookie, amateur, hot-headed behavior from Adafruit.

> 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.

still vague as hell lol

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.

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 have projects that can equally use either a Teensy or a few different Feather boards, and frankly the Feather boards are always the prefferred option beacause:

* assymetrical footprint - the assymmetrical dip footprint means the board has polarity protection. I have hat/receiver boards with zig-zag stagger dip rows that work as free componentless sockets to receive a feather board with pins soldered. The Feather versions are far more convenient and safe since they can't be plugged in any way but the correct way.

* The Feather standard being a standard - ecosystem of compatible boards with compatible footprint & pinout at least for main functions.

* lipo charging circuit and jst plug, the automatic ups functionality, usb charging, removable/replaceable via standard plug

* off-board power on/off - I very much make use of the trick Feather has where a hat can turn the mcu board on/off without being the source of power to the mcu board.

* Perhaps a small detail but Feathers with sd card slots have the card sense pin wired up to a gpio pin while the teensy's do not. On Feather I can have a hardware interrupt fire when a card is inserted or ejected, and I can't do that on Teensy.

* keeping all parts on the top surface - there are other mcu dev boards with some similar functions but they are less convenient to use as a module in a project since they may have buttons, jst plug, sd card slot, or other stuff on both sides of the board, which makes them inaccessible when mounted onto some other pcb.

Teensy has a few points in their favor too but I really value these facets of most Feather 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.

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?

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.

Yeah this is how I read it as well.

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.

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.

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)

Perhaps a foot pedal? Maybe Adafruit could make one.

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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.

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.

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.

I was going to ask more about your philosophy, but after collapsing all of the other replies, I got to see what you were replying to.

I fear the page formatting caused an entirely respectable joke to be lost to many people

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

Those voltage standards are kind of meant for very local things. If you really get into industrial things, one should look to industrial standards that work over longer distances. That is things like RS422, RS485, and increasingly industrial versions of ethernet that use differential signals. One should also learn what a PLC is and understand that in an industrial context, implementing controls in an Arduino or rpi is probably reinventing the wheel to achieve less reliability than industry standards.

4 to 20mA sensors are great. Invented in the 50s (!) to replace pneumatic controls and to this day work great. iirc they are usually 24V these days. You missed an important detail; the first 4mA (96mW) powers the sensor/local microcontroller (no local power supply required), and the remaining 4-20mA gives a calibrated current output for voltage/pressure/whatever you are measuring. If the output is less than 4mA or more than 20mA you know something is wrong (and many devices will output 20.1, 20.2 etc currents as a kind of fault code).

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!

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.

> "Someone did a CoC violation" is just a way for an org to say "someone was an asshole [...]"

Not even that, since so many CoCs are vague enough that someone unprincipled wielding them could be using them for petty interpersonal disputes. Unless I already have reason to trust the accuser, when I see "CoC violation" it tells me there's drama but it doesn't tell me who the asshole is.

> 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?

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.

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”.

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.

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.

This is nothing to do with Code of Conduct and just one business chosing not to do business with another.

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.

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.

If that's what they're referring to, then my question is why does that need to end?

Yes, the broader context of that email chain is a broad unloading of a 'greatest hits' of a decade of grievances against SparkFun (the meme site mentioned was made in 2017, by an employee who no longer works there).

I quoted the lines that seemed to most obviously tip that particular email exchange beyond a measured harassment report (as originally implied), crossing the line into what could be reasonably considered 'unappropriately aggressive behavior' (to quote the SparkFun CoC).

I would agree that the ex-employee's 'Sincerely, Fuck Off' was similarly aggressive, but less relevant since he's no longer an employee anyway, and it seemed pretty clear that he was the one being subject to targeted harassment in this instance (having accusations being forwarded to his partner's employer) rather than the other way around.

These are uncorroborated, unevidenced accusations, which is probably why they went unquoted

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

Yes, indeed, given the claims of targeted harassment of random participants this thread is dealing with, I preferred to avoid being personally targeted next just for being another random participant. Others will have to trust that I'm not previously involved, just a HN observer trying to make sense of the details of this dispute now that it spilled over here.

> 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.

Maybe I missed something, but this wasn't a simple reply to a private email as you seem to imply- it was a public social media post linking their name to their account (which they had specifically avoided for privacy purposes), not edited/removed after it was made clear that the exposure of that information was harmful to them, and the misgendering/dead-naming was repeated in subsequent communications after it was made clear that this behavior was unwanted. Is any of that inaccurate?

> 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.

Not having been involved at all, I know nothing about the 'long, documented history' of grievances between you all, but if there are missing details that would help further clarify what the dispute here is really about, feel free to go beyond a 'vague public accusation' and share them directly.

> the individual you reference had already been removed from multiple retro and maker communities prior to this dispute for documented behavior.

Their response when you made this claim in November was “what communities?????”. Are you perhaps mixing them up with someone else? (Source: https://digipres.club/@discatte/115595517911363679.)

> "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.

"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.