If it looks to good to be true.... or Caveat Emptor

Today I had a major upset in the build of this last batch of V2.1 loggers. My usual (reputable) supplier of FT232RL chips was out of stock, so I found a supplier on eBay. Unfortunately the chips were counterfeit.  They looked almost identical, but when plugged into my laptop they reprogrammed themselves, and became non functional.

FT232RL chip fitted

The one on the left is genuine, on the right counterfeit!

It was in the end relatively trivial to edit the driver to function with these loggers, but I'm not willing to ship counterfeit goods to paying customers. This combined with a house move this weekend has severely impacted on my ability to supply all the orders that I received over Christmas. 


Normal service should be resumed in the next week once the new workshop is up and running.

"Merry Christmas one and all!"

This Christmas has been very busy in the BelfryBoy workshop, with 30 loggers ordered in the last month, this has taken up a lot of my time and my stock has dwindled rapidly, so I decided to see if the assembly process could be improved.

The last 15 Mk 2.1 boards with their younger brother Mk 2.3

 The main bottleneck has been attaching the USB cable, so this was the obvious place to start, so I have changed the attachment method to use a solderless connector.

 I have also found obtaining the FTDI USB to serial chip problematic, so have changed that as well.

 One final improvement has been the addition of a small handle to make logger removal easier.

 The first boards have arrived and been successfully tested and are now on their way to two lucky weather enthusiasts.

 Thanks everyone for your continued patience if you have ordered one, they will be on their way in the next week.

The latest evolution of the BelfryBoy logger

Close up view