Is this genuine/licensed parallax product? (BS2 in molded DIP 24)
CuriousOne
Posts: 931
While browsing taobao.com, found this interesting thing:
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.38.WJB02t&id=16711116490&initiative_new=1
Basic 2 stamp module in factory molded DIP24 case!
Were they ever made by Parallax, or this is a replica?
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.38.WJB02t&id=16711116490&initiative_new=1
Basic 2 stamp module in factory molded DIP24 case!
Were they ever made by Parallax, or this is a replica?
Comments
More like taboo.com!
Parallax does this just to protect itself from fakes.
There are some odd ideas in Taiwan and China about what is and isn't a fake. Having 28 pins and tiny differences in the Basic Stamp 2 label are considered by some to be enough of a difference to be another brand.
Trying to get through Mainland China's legal system could be a nightmare, but the US government might help remove the internet listing.
Is anyone interested in some fake Motorola 2N3055 transistors. The logo is 90 degrees off from normal and the M is not stylized like a true Motorola. The local vendor refuses to accept return as they are 'just another brand', not Motorola. (The real question is what did they relabel and will it work.)
AFAIK the BS2 base code is more locked up at HQ then the recipe for diet coke . .
(the 'secrecy' is just marketing.)
They also know what'll happen if they try to use it.
If someone walks into the office of a soda factory and offers them the recipe they'll probably call the cops.
As for the BS2 knock-off.
It looks good, though...
The PBasic language is well specified, so a clean room style clone should be possible. Where they're definitely crossing the line is calling it a Basic Stamp 2, as it clearly can't be that.
In the years I've been using the Basic Stamp there have been a few 24 pin modules crop up from competitors that are similar to the Basic Stamp. But they are always marketed with a unique name that clearly indicates that they are not the Basic Stamp.
Of course, if you want to use the Parallax compiler and documention, you would be in violation of the software licenses as well.
It isn't all 'bad news". This indicates that finally there is a market and brand recognition for the BasicStamp2 in China and that users are even willing to program in English software.
By the time the establish a market for BS2 product, everyone will be asking where are the Propeller chips?
The bottom line is you haven't really developed a demand for your product in the Chinese mass market until somebody is trying to make knockoffs and think they can get rich doing so. There is a silver lining to this cloud.
All of our products are made in Rocklin.
Are they on our legal hit list, as suggested above? No, because there's not a worst way to spend one's time, especially if these sales are within China. If it started to appear in the USA and gained traction we'd take a closer look.
China is the world's "original open source community" long before it was fashionable in the USA and Europe, at least the way we understand open source hardware. A few weeks ago I wandered a market in Xi'an where you could buy "North Face" backpacks for about $25. They hardly even call them copies anymore. In fact, it might take a North Face expert to distinguish the stitching and material from the authentic version because these copies are getting really good. Even worse, some factories that originally engaged in export will either back-door ship or outsource the same design for domestic China manufacturing.
You should see the "Apple stores" in China. Aside from the official Apple-authorized stores, there are store copies everywhere. They exhibit the steel facade, white glass, clean look and actually sell real iPads and related apple product - to some extent. Look closer and you'll see that they've replaced batteries with Chinese ones, that the boxes are cheaper, and that the official Apple adapters are not really from Apple. Or are they? Point is, you can't even determine what's fake and what's not anymore.
While returning home I grabbed a copy of the English China Daily to read on Air China. There was an article about how the government now "encourages that only authentic software be used in government-run offices". No teeth, no care, no worries. . . .
There's another side to China's copy mentality that we may not understand as westerners. It's the notion that if something has been perfected we should simply duplicate it because it's already been perfected: architecture, products, whatever.
Exactly. For this reason we are introducing the Propeller educational program to their universities. They can copy all of the hardware if needed - though their results will vary - but they ultimately have to buy the chips from P A R A L L A X!
Buyer beware. That price is absurdly cheap. I suspect that this might be a small time crook that is just taking old 28 pin DIPs and gluing a piece of cardboard that says BasicStamp2 to the backs of them.
After all, in a nation where some people salvage SMD resistors for reuse, anything might arrive. The great scandals in the past of gutter oil used for making moon cakes is just one dubious enterprise that comes to mind.
What is gutter oil? Well, when you clean the sewers, there is a certain amount of grease from cooking that is floating along. So why not collect in and sell as nice fresh cooking oil? Yech. That was the 1990s. I believe China is beyond that now.
I can buy knock-off designer jeans extremely cheap in Thailand. But the funny thing is the weight of the demin is about half of that in the US or Europe... nice for tropical South-east Asia. ... but they don't last very long.
Peope eventually desire real quality. Maybe Parallax should put the factory on a factory outlet shopping tour out of San Francisco. Asians do travel just to buy the real items to bring back home.
Some offers on taobao are plain funny. Like offer for 1000uf 450V Nippon chemi-con capacitors - "They are fake, real capacity is only 220uf, but label quality is great, looks and feels like an original"
Ken, Introduction to the US was my main point. I would be pretty surprised if BS2 knockoffs haven't been available for years in China. My concern is that I know of US based companies that source through Taobao. As far as China goes, you could have a reality TV game-show where contestants have to shop around to find a product that is an original!
Yeah, I understood your point as intended.
And the BS2 has been available for years in China already. I'm not sure if they cracked the PBASIC interpreter. The Shenzhen book stores have Chinese books copied after ours and their own hardware that resembles ours. The Arduino is also available for $10 and has an accurate resemblance to the real thing. They copy the whole thing. In both of these cases, only Microchip and Atmel prosper.
Soft goods like books are really hard hit, and I'm not sure how any economy can support it. The file lockers are filled with posts, often from those living in China, India, and Russia, of cracked eBooks. One might argue the majority of downloaders of pirated books would not have bought them anyway, but sales figures suggest a different story.
The Propeller looks like a good way to avoid the perils of piracy. They'd have to go to great lengths to copy it.
What is really annoying for teaching purposes is that manages to eliminate the page numbers in the process. So when you tell the class to turn to the example on page 153, about half the class is in a muddle.
To make matters worse, overseas publishers have printed texts with page numbers, indices, and key content in a blue that the copier doesn't see. But the students insist on using these flawed text and waste a huge amount of class time.
What can we copy for China that we haven't already? Chopsticks, hole in the floor toilets, traffic jams?
David Carrier gave them a look and they worked. Code protect was enabled but the first 64 instructions can still be read and they match the BS2 code that we program with 100%.
Ken Gracey
Parallax Inc.
Contact your US Senator's office if you want to put some pressure on Alibaba to not sell illegal copies of your BasicStamp in China.
Alibaba is in the midst of trying to do a huge IPO on the NYSE after failing to get it done through the Hong Kong securites exchange.
There is a trade council between the US and China in Washington, D.C. that your Senator can put you in touch will and your problems will be included on a long list of wrongs to be corrected in US/China trade.
In other words, you don't need to hire lawyers to fight individual battles with individual offenders, use the government=to=governent dialogue to do it for you.
Since everything you make originates from Rocklin and nowhere else, you don't have to do much to provide that the clone is unlicensed.
They may be able to make them, but I suspect they can be shut of of the internet marketplace... even in China.
I am very curious. Is is really just the look and feel of a 24pin dip as the picture shows, or is it an assembled device? And did they really provide 28 pins, or just 24?
@Ken: It was difficult to get, downright impossible to get shipped to the US. My friend in HK who visits China regularly was able to order some. It requires extra hardware: an EEPROM, crystal, RS232 converter, and more. Certainly not a drop-in replacement for a BS2, but cheap at $3 & change.
What's more disturbing is this other BS2 clone I just found on Aliexpress, which does ship to the US. $25 shipped includes a USB-RS232 programmer. Calls it a BASIC Stamp 2 and has a screen shot of the PBASIC editor.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Parallax-Basic-Stamp-BS2-Programmer/768947920.html
Ken, you might want to check that one out as well.
@Ken,
Why not require users provide an email address to download the BasicStamp IDE from overseas? You could then monitor whether these guys are dreaming of riches or have a real following.
And if they have a real following, you could send email promotions of the real thing directly to those users.
In other words, they may create the market for you and you can use th downloading of your IDE to take away their market share.
There are ways I really like to spend my time at Parallax: working with customers, the educational program and the courses we run, working with others to create new products, using our products, writing material for the web site and working with our machine tools. This is very rewarding.
There are things I find very unsatisfying, too. They include legal issues, trying to change situations that cannot be changed, working with politicians, and leading a web development team who would rather add projects and content our customers want instead of legal click-throughs and verifications we cannot enforce. And if I really don't like a particular job I'm not going to ask others to do it (except kitting, some manufacturing processes, etc.).
I think chasing these posers around falls into the second category for Parallax: very unsatisfying.
You are right that we should defend what's ours, but I know the outcome will be very hard to achieve and at a great expense of loss of enthusiasm.
To the Chinese copycats: spend your time copying the ActivityBot and buying our Propeller chips. You're a generation behind.
Like you, I would rather spend my time making more satisfied customers than policing an enterprise's property. I also dislike having to turn to lawyers on a retainer and hourly rate that seem to just plod along will billing hours while not producing results or explaining much of what the realities are.
I still think that your U.S. senators should listen to you about this. And I think the Small Business Administration should be willing to provide you free consultation on a cost effective management scheme. After all, you are a small business, and these services are there for you.
Having said that... I will restate a few facts.
A. Taobao is part of Ailbaba. Alibaba is seriously considering having the NYSE provide a huge IPO (10 times the amount expected by Twitter's up-coming IPO). I don't see why they should be allowed access to the NYSE to raise funds if this kind in invasive practise is prevelant. This is merely handing them 100 billion USD of funding!.
http://www.mercurynews.com/60-second-business-break/ci_24175464/biz-break-move-aside-twitter-alibaba-is-now?source=rss
B. The Economist has recently published a comparision of wealth between China's government representatives and the USA government representives. China seems to have about 100x more net worth amongst the Top 50 in term of wealth when comparted to the USA.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2013/09/economist-china-1?zid=306&ah=1b164dbd43b0cb27ba0d4c3b12a5e227
C. Alibaba was refused the Hong Kong IPO because of a unique business structure. While it is mostly corporate, the top of the structure is a group of 20 partners that have profit sharing bonuses paying directly to them (likely off the top).
It seems to me that the government itself is more than willing to let such enterprises continue without stepping it. Everyone is making money from looking the other way. Washington, D.C. has trade councils and the Department of Commerce has channels to deal with such issues.
Obviously, I am not saying that you will stop these sales within China, but you may be able to shut down the global internet advetising and have any imports to the USA and other treaty countries confiscated by Customs officers.
At worst, you might find a better way to build oversea's distribution channels. That could be a good thing, just because the Chinese not only tend to be awash with junk clones of branded items; they usually end up perferring the real thing and will pay the premium once they become aware of its better quality.
I don't usually talk about all the stuff that is copied throughout Asia, but there is a lot of it. Taiwan has gotten better about it just because they have so much at stake in their semiconductor industry, but Taiwan is a drop in the bucket if you include China, Malyasia, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Thailand, and other poor cousins and less populations.
I recall my visit to GuangZhou about 10 years ago. After hearing for about 10 years in Taiwan that Mainland China was putting a stop to illegal sale of ivory, rhino horn, and tiger parts; my first night in the government hotal across from the old train station was a surprise as the tiger parts and elephant irony were on-sale and open display in stores on the first floor. I didn't see any rhino horn, but that just might have been in less demand as too pricey. And of course, the items on sale could all have been fake; but that is neither here or there.
And yes, the China are behind the times due to copying being so much a part of their culture, but their market for Parallax will always be behind ... just because of this apporach. The majority of the sales for you right now in China might be in BasicStamp2 products. That might be all they are ready for.