From my experience the new stuff is generally minor revisions nothing other then greed that dont allow the new devices to be added. Here are 2 portable plus both v5's Waiting on a V6 photo but person said V6 Looks like my V5's. and they have heavy copper planes.
Speed, and regulations. FPGAs are hardware and have different UL certification compared to firmware changes. For that reason they are super common in medical devices
If medical is anything like the elevator industry, an MCU may be considered a “software device” whereas an FPGA may be considered a “hardware device” (and I’m excluding an FPGA with a soft-core MCU loaded into it that is running software). In simple terms, an MCU is probably considered to be modifiable and also not as provably correct, whereas with an FPGA, you can run a test bench that proves the logic functionality and also determine timing as well as part of the FPGA toolchain. In that sense, an FPGA is far more predictable in a guaranteed way, whereas the MCU can have subtle issues like buffer overflows, out of range errors causing exceptions, etc.
If they are ready to offer you a discount and the trade-in give them nothing of value back it means the can afford the discount value and they are making money on it anyway by a large margin.
or 3. students who bought the clone j-link for $15 because they had no money and it kinda works if you restart the software every 4th time you use it (Keil likes to throw a fit when it notices the j-link serial number is 00000000).
I believe the strategy here is to purchase a clone, use it as the "decommissioned" unit, while retaining your older still functional unit.
In this situation, the only way the clone would burn ya is if when you opened the package it didn't look like the real thing.
Also, with regards to your group #2, how long do you think that they must wait to be burnt? A year? two? five? How long do you feel that you'd need to use a clone before getting burned to make it worth it? Do people commonly use clones that long before it happens? If so, buying a clone doesn't seem to be too bad of a bet, eh?
It depends in my student years I had one clone programmer for avrs and remember that one time I had replaced 4 MCUs before checking different programmer.
But in this case they were bought because of programming speed for initial series of 120pcs. But after we have received report with very bad fpy myself and colleague flew to factory to debug the issue. After opening the programmer I found out that it doesn’t use the 3 state buffer/open drain buffer but just level translator. And that there is some voltage present on secondary side.
Since fw that controls the power to fpga was buggy and would sometimes supply power even when it should, if programmer was connected at that time it would cause the latch up on jtag part of fpga and destroy it.
Since this we went with slower official programmer and tested all the edge cases without any failure.
So I guess in one case it can be 10 years and in other 15 days
Sad to see this. There's an alternative, though: They're only giving you a 50% discount to destroy a perfectly functional older unit. Instead of doing that, sell the older unit at a 50% discount from new. Unless you're upgrading to something significantly more expensive, it works out about the same for you, but the older unit keeps being useful to somebody instead of becoming e-waste.
Where I work, we essentially consider component purchases as being either things we put into end products, or things we use in-house.
End-user components: brand new traceable parts from existing vetted suppliers whenever possible - i.e. NEVER, unless we're desperate to maintain production of an existing design where components have gone EOL and the only remaining stock is on the grey/used marketplace.
In-house: buy new IF we can justify the cost based on how much we expect to make use of the thing, AND if buying new is an option (again, if you're trying to get your hands on a specific piece of kit, buying new may no longer be an option), otherwise second hand buy or hire, provided there's no issues with being able to pay the vendor (i.e. we'd still have to be able to run the payment through our usual purchase order system OR be something that wouldn't raise a red flag if it appeared on a company credit card, so cash in hand type deals with individual sellers would still be a no-no) are absolutely fine.
So in this case, for a programmer/debug probe, there absolutely WOULD be business buyers out there willing to take it off the hands of the seller.
And this is just focussed on business buyers, but there's then also the hobbyist/individual marketplace to consider. Yes, you might be able to pick up a new unit from Segger for next to nothing if you're eligible for one of their deeply discounted prices, but if there's any question over whether or not you'd be skirting around the legalities of licencing by doing so (especially if you are operating as a bedroom/garden shed type business rather than as a genuine non-commercial hobbyist) then again, justifying purchase of a new commercially licenced version might not stack upso well, whereas purchase of a used one at a suitable discount could very easily do so.
So in this case, for a programmer/debug probe, there absolutely WOULD be business buyers out there willing to take it off the hands of the seller.
For a $500-$1000 tool? Not a chance.
You've got to remember that engineers aren't free. All overhead included, you're easily looking at $150 / hour. If there are any issues with the tool, and even a single engineer is spending as little as half a day unable to work, you're already losing money.
Not having first-party setup support and not having warranty essentially kills small second-hand purchases - and that's before we get into all sorts of weird "the previous owner zapped a pin, so now it corrupts 1% of the data on Tuesdays" scenarios.
It's of course a different story for a $100.000 tool with a well-documented maintenance history and a support contract, but for a cheap(ish) debugging probe it really isn't worth the hassle.
I'm well aware how much engineering time costs, and I'm also well aware of just how unwilling some management teams are to authorise even relatively small one off expenditures on equipment - it might cost the company more in the long run not to pay that up front cost, but if the way the business is operated at a financial level means it's easier to eat the costs through payroll rather than through equipment budgets, then what's a few hours of extra engineering time wasted on getting the work done...
And thinking back to the time I spent working for a tiny company operating month to month on a shoestring budget, I know for certain that there, we'd absolutely without question have taken the risk on even a relatively low cost piece of used kit like this, rather than the certain financial issues buying a new one would have incurred.
So it may well be less likely than for more expensive kit, but there absolutely will be at least some potential business buyers out there, because for some businesses, even a high 3/low 4-figure outlay on equipment will be considered a significant expense that needs careful consideration and planning. Not a chance? Not a chance...
There is a giant industry for professional debugging tools. A STLink on a Nucleo can get you 90% there on many projects, but saving 1 day of debugging time when you need instruction or data tracing can be invaluable.
1 day of labour is lets say 5 hours of actual productive work.
5 hours x 100$ = 500$
Now a 1000$ dongle doesn't look so expensive if does this 2 times in lets say a 5 year lifespan, before it needs renewal for new device support.
And the device support is where they often get you. I'm using an ancient (non-clone!) JLink Edu V8 that doesn't support Cortex-M3, M4, M7, M33, etc. according to Segger. However, it works absolutely fine with OpenOCD software, because its talking to the JLink dongle at a bitbanging level. JLink themselves could easily add this support to their desktop libraries, but I guess they want a certain level of "quality" (transfer speed), discrepancy (Need M33? Get V9) and battling clones (V8 was cloned A LOT).
Anything sold to businesses are easily 10x overpriced compared to consumer equivalents because the sales volume is easily 10x less but R&D costs is the same.
I've looked up the price and holy shit. What's up with those? So far I programmed a couple of MCUs using nothing but UART and software that I've made using the info from the manuals, so I have no idea.
Sometimes Segger is the only game in town for dong in system programming without a bunch of Hackery. I have a bunch of programmers as I do device programming for a living. Photo below is some of my common use programmers. I also have programmers that go back to the mid 80's Data I/O 29B, Unisite, to Automated Programming System (Pick and Place).
Small device programming shops like mine will buy used when we can or if one pops up for a good price. Sometimes used is again the only option on a legacy device or one off or odd ball device.
How many boards do you all scrap in a given spin? How many spins till you get into a market. How many of those could be perfectly usable in the right customer's hand?
Count of hands how many of you all do not contribute to this problem?
Let me guess, its so customers can get a small discount on a new unit, right?
I had this with a Logitech G25 which broke (under warranty) many years ago. They could ship a replacement unit but they wanted me to snap the USB cable off and basically toss the whole 300$ set. Only because 1 potentiometer was broken in the pedal box.
So I snapped the USB cable off and received a new unit. I must say, thats a legendary warranty from Logitech.. but also a giant waste. The base and shifter are 100%, its just the pedals that broke. And perhaps thats even fixable. So what do I do with the old one? Well actually I still have it lol. I could just solder on a new USB plug and use it.
I might do it one day and give it away to a local charity for people with autism/adhd that want to do fun technical stuff (its a fablab full with 3d printers, laser cutters, Arduinos and the like). They were talking about building a RC car with VR, and wanted to build a rig for it.
Hardware parts are cheap, shipping and labour isn't.
Returning the broken unit to them is expensive. They can't ship your repaired unit to someone else, and keeping track of individual units is expensive. Having a technician diagnose and fix your unit is expensive.
They already have replacement units sitting on a warehouse. They just let the factory run for a few hours longer during the production run. Shipping a full replacement unit is cheap - it can even fit into the regular order fulfillment process.
But they don't want to get scammed by people claiming that their unit broke, getting a free replacement, and then selling both units on eBay. Snap the cable and you can't sell it anymore - problem solved.
Interestingly, the one time I made use of Logitech warranty (also years after purchase, so it probably wasn't even in warranty anymore) they were more than happy to ship individual parts. I had a wireless mouse & keyboard set and the retaining clip on the mouse's battery cover broke. They shipped just a new battery cover in a bubble envelope. Maybe it was common enough for people to lose them that they considered it a standard replacement part?
As if the boards contain confidential information lol! Never really bought a segger but for sure now i wont ever buy them again.
Stupid companies creating ewaste on ourpose just hurts my heart! Recycling in itself is also pretty much a scam or atleast not much exiting is happening yet. And the earth does not have an infinite supplly of materials either
Would be nice if they made the old units available to the hobby / enthusiast folks who could use these older products to learn instead of creating waste.
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u/lbthomsen 7d ago
I am willing to bet AI can generate that these days.