SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

https://www.sparkfun.com/official-response

by yaleman • 6 months ago

504 499 6 months ago

ramblurr• 6 months ago

Obviously given the lack of information (maybe for the best?) there's nothing really to comment on when it comes to the allegations

However, I do wonder what this will mean for Adafruit product availability in Europe, as most stores I know of that sell Adafruit products here are Sparkfun distributors.

reactordev• 6 months ago

One of four possible outcomes:

- This blows up in Sparkfun’s face and they lose sales for not having Adafruit so they invite them back. Or Adafruit apologies and comes back.

- Adafruit is forced to become their own distributor and be a Sparkfun.

- Adafruit finds another distributor willing to go to battle with Sparkfun.

- Adafruit is no longer available in Europe.

rpcope1• 6 months ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but the big players that I know ship and sell globally like Digikey, Newark and Arrow are all Adafruit distributors, and presumably that wouldn't change. Do you mean brick and mortar or something else?

echelon2• 6 months ago

Why publish this publicly? Now I wonder what really happened.

The SparkFun folks are cool. Back when I was a broke college student, they sent me free electronics kits. I massively respect them for that.

I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.

seidleroni• 6 months ago

I suspect they made this public because many customers will notice that they are no longer carrying Adafruit products. I respect both companies greatly and have purchased from them in the past. It will be interesting to see what happened, if that is made public.

geerlingguy• 6 months ago

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.

cogman102• 6 months ago

Why publish this publicly?

I'm guessing to get ahead of any sort of speculation on why Sparkfun stops carrying their products? Perhaps also to get ahead of Adafruit publishing a similar public statement with more/conflicting details?

beeforpork• 6 months ago

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

LightHugger• 6 months ago

I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.

This aspect is not very surprising, it is usually moral high grounders who end up found to be doing something wrong, people like to compensate and try to put down others when they know they are in the wrong.

jacquesm8• 6 months ago

I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here.

You don't actually know that for a fact.

mosura2• 6 months ago

The inevitable speculation will occur, in which I have no useful insight.

I will say adafruit have clearly been heading in a bit of the wrong direction lately. See the misleading noise about arduino, for example. Have to wonder if the whole tariff situation is hurting them and it is causing these ripples.

b1122• 6 months ago

I did check on archive.org, and the code of conduct is there on March 2025. So they didn't just add it in the last month or so, and then send this notice.

robotfelix2• 6 months ago

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!

xyzzyxy8• 6 months ago

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

sorcix• 6 months ago

The URL for this page is very generic and bound to become a 404 page. Thinking about URLs is important to prevent link rot.

hrimfaxi• 6 months ago

Almost like it's by design.

Dylan16807• 6 months ago

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.

dieggsy• 6 months ago

Agreed. Because of this (and regardless), archive everything:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260114140733/https://www.spark...

alnwlsn5• 6 months ago

Sparkfun redid their site a couple years ago and nuked the links to all product pages of retired products too. A shame. I found someone's archive of the old site at one point, but I've since misplaced it.

bob1029• 6 months ago

The URL for this page is clearly a knee-jerk reaction. I don't expect it will survive the week.

progbits• 6 months ago

Sending and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material to SparkFun employees, former employees and customers
Inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter

Well those are fun accusations. Looking forward to adafruit response. Anyone has any context?

Keep in mind adafruit and sparkfun are business competitors. Not saying either is lying but statements need to be examined carefully. For what it's worth I've purchased from both many times and was always happy customer so this is sad to see.

csande173• 6 months ago

Adafruit's response seems to be here: https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-... (via https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens... )

in july, we [Adafruit] told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order. for years, sparkfun's leadership ignored specific behavior from leadership (and employees, now former... they had created and promoted hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment targeting limor, me, and others at adafruit. this was done on company time, shared, promoted. this was reported to them. it was documented and ignored. that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_
months later in 2025, the same individual resurfaced and re-promoted it with what appears to be nate's blessing at the time. we again told sparkfun to deal with this. instead of addressing the behavior, sparkfun’s response was to “ban” adafruit from purchasing teensy by invoking a vague, secret set of rules that neither we nor paul (the creator of teensy) were allowed to see.
this is not a one-off. nate (the founder of sparkfun) has done this before. anyone who has worked with him long enough knows this is how conflict is handled: deflect, escalate, and try to punish rather than deal with the underlying conduct.

SpikedCola• 6 months ago

That certainly doesn't come off well for SparkFun.

palmotea2• 6 months ago

Ok, so what's the drama? Because it's obvious that there was some drama there: "inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter," "Responding and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material."

My guess is someone was trying to hit on someone and got mad when they were rejected.

Dangeranger3• 6 months ago

This post [0] suggests that leadership at SparkFun has been engaged in a long term harassment campaign targeting the founder of AdaFruit (Limor Fried) using company resources, and is allegedly using their CoC as a smokescreen to cover up their own bad behavior and cast blame on the victim.

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

drastic9• 6 months ago

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

RobotToaster2• 6 months ago

To publish such a vague statement is an obvious invitation for speculation. It seems like rather questionable behaviour itself from spatkfun.

The fact that they mention a "private matter" makes me think this is some petty personal grievance that has somehow escalated to this.

NetMageSCW• 6 months ago

What would you have them publish instead? Your curiosity does not overcome the right to privacy of those involved.

mohaine• 6 months ago

It seems like releasing more would have probably broken the exact same rules they are claiming AdaFruit broke.

PurpleRamen4• 6 months ago

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.

pepperball• 6 months ago

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

lelanthran2• 6 months ago

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.

Twirrim• 6 months ago

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

CoastalCoder• 6 months ago

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.

Rebelgecko• 6 months ago

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

Hizonner• 6 months ago

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.

Perz1val2• 6 months ago

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

mbreese• 6 months ago

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.

ugh123• 6 months ago

What would you have them publish instead?

How about nothing and continue to resolve the matter privately? If you intentionally leave out important details and context then you're just manipulating public sentiment to gain leverage on the other guy.

csomar• 6 months ago

In my opinion, you either publish everything and every detail or simply publish nothing.

Here is the tl;dr: My business partner sucks and is a bad person. I am not going to say what he did but he sucks. I am cutting him off.

quitit• 6 months ago

While SparkFun may feel entitled to air their grievances as an "Official response", these types of public statements aren't productive for business nor useful/respectful to consumers.

Public notices for the consumer should serve the consumer. I.e. they should only relate to matters that directly concern them, such as notice of availability, warranty, support or the fulfilment of other consumers' rights. Those statements should be unambiguous and not allude to blame or personal tiffs.

While Sparkfun's statement touches on availability it merely does so as a vehicle for grandstanding and retaliation through gossip and drama. The fact that SparkFun notes it's a "private matter" yet chose to involve the public also makes SparkFun look unprofessional, even if they are 0% at fault for the circumstances.

Consumers put their trust in a company, it is disrespectful of that trust when trying to embroil them in personal affairs, they never agreed to that.

fortran772• 6 months ago

Yes. They really should have just put a notice up that they're no longer distributing AdaFruit products and direct people to Adafruit website.

ptorrone18• 6 months ago

hi, phil here — post on adafruit here: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teens...

i’ll stop back and answer anything (sparkfun will not?).

sparkfun is the exclusive maker and distributor of the closed-source teensy and informed us we will not be able to purchase the teensy. this happened after i sent an email reporting the founder, nate, for multiple harassing actions directed at limor, including behavior by him and a former employee.

instead of addressing that, they decided to kill the messenger, me, and also cut us off from teensy.

so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters, we are doing an open-source alternative. so customers are not stranded, and this is not a supply chain emergency for us. looking forward to seeing which one delights customers more.

as much as nate wants to continue trying to damage limor’s business and adafruit by scraping our site, and now potentially not paying royalties owed after more than a decade of consistent payments, that’s nothing new. it’s a business strategy to cut others out, not a mystery or a “private drama.”

this is exactly why we do open source. when a closed product or exclusive channel is used as leverage, the correct response is to remove the leverage.

sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.

ask away!

Y_Y3• 6 months ago

Have you also been embargoed from buying shift keys?

reincarnate0x142• 6 months ago

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.

ptorrone18• 6 months ago

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

YackerLose• 6 months ago

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

drcongo• 6 months ago

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.

nanomonkey• 6 months ago

some of us are anti-capitalist

phkahler• 6 months ago

No questions. Just move on. Engaging in public spectacle isn't a good look for anyone.

freedomben• 6 months ago

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.

knorker• 6 months ago

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.

swed4203• 6 months ago

Wouldn't be the first time CoC was used as a lame attempt to harm open source.

Thanks for speaking up.

allreduce3• 6 months ago

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.

MaKey5• 6 months ago

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.

napkinartist2• 6 months ago

This post is not a good look. You come off as quite snide. In particular, things like "Sparkfun will not?", calling a CoC concern a weirdo behavior, responding to harassment allegations by saying the did it first.

This seems very much like two businesses experiencing friction and separating, which happens all the time. You coming in and framing the flames makes doesn't scan particularly positively to me.

withinboredom• 6 months ago

Why do I need to prove I'm human to read your blog?

systemtest2• 6 months ago

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

tyre• 6 months ago

Because AI scraping is everywhere and flooding sites with useless traffic. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best people can do atm

Bjartr• 6 months ago

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.

BirAdam• 6 months ago

Glad to hear that there will by an open source option. This honestly makes the Teensy/Freensy an option for me where before it wasn't.

Is there any thought to expanding the Freensy lineup beyond a pure clone?

_blk• 6 months ago

Looks like you guys are handling it right from a consumer standpoint. Thanks for letting us know and for not playing the fingerpointing game in public. Looks like you're not playing at all and just moving on. Nice.

napkinartist2• 6 months ago

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.

827a• 6 months ago

If it means anything, the first thought I had reading this post was "I wonder how SparkFun is exaggerating or misrepresenting this situation, because I can't believe Adafruit of all organizations is in the wrong here."

Dangeranger3• 6 months ago

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

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

micromacrofoot2• 6 months ago

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.

justsid• 6 months ago

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.

tedivm2• 6 months ago

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.

milesvp• 6 months ago

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.

Aurornis• 6 months ago

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.

serf• 6 months ago

so! instead of posting weirdo "code of conduct" letters..

one corporate side overshares by pointing fingers and accusing a different corporation...

so that corporation decides to be the better person, declare the opponent as weirdos, then proceed to point fingers at individuals instead for collective action from the public.

nice look, both groups.

rockskon• 6 months ago

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

colechristensen2• 6 months ago

This is the tiny corporate version of a teenage girl posting a long content free rant about being betrayed by friends.

All I see is bickering children and I like both less as a result. I don't really care who is more right.

vasco4• 6 months ago

Yeah if it were me I'd just stop selling the stuff. You don't a justification to choose your partners.

JKCalhoun• 6 months ago

Trying to parse as I am not in the know. Nate is Nate Seidle, CEO of SparkFun Electronics?

I know SparkFun recently took over Paul Stoffregen and Robin Coon's Teensy production (I reached out at the time and Paul said it was cool).

I'm guessing Adafruit got a special deal in purchasing Teensy's from SparkFun but because of an allegation made by you against Nate, they are responding by dropping your entire product line?

Anyway, good luck to everyone involved. It's a small community of companies that provide for makers.

PunchyHamster• 6 months ago

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

Imustaskforhelp• 6 months ago

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!

vasco4• 6 months ago

I don't think so, Nate is founder, they've had another CEO for 10 years, signing the letter in this submission.

aftbit• 6 months ago

Oh boy, just what we need. Drama between open hardware vendors. Neither of these responses feels like the complete story to me. I hope there's a path forward to heal this rift in one way or another. Both SparkFun and Adafruit are doing amazing things for the community and I would love to see both continue to thrive.

beambot• 6 months ago

Seems to be the inevitable trend... Just in recent times: Pebble drama, Arduino joining the dark side, now Sparkfun & Adafruit. End of an era

tedivm2• 6 months ago

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.

csande173• 6 months ago

Appreciate the transparency! The one thing that doesn't quite add up for me is SparkFun accusing you of "involving a SparkFun customer" in the dispute. Can you comment on what that might be referring to?

mort96• 6 months ago

This needs a response, and my opinion will certainly be up in the air until I hear an explanation (or lack thereof) from AdaFruit.

RA2lover• 6 months ago

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-...

dec0dedab0de6• 6 months ago

Do you have a response/explanation for the two specific accusations about forwarding inappropriate emails to sparkfun employees, and involving a customer with something?

Those seem extremely vague, but I didn't see them mentioned in the blog post.

csande173• 6 months ago

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.

aaronblohowiak3• 6 months ago

What’s the deal with 5v, 3.3v and 24v “standards” for sensors? It seems like there are really three different markets and it sucks because crossing “lanes” is really annoying. I like how you all made the qwik connectors “just work”, but now that I’m trying more industrial stuff I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get my 24v world to play nicely with the 3.3v world but of course my 24v world only wants to do SPI over 5v.

Anyhoo, sorry we can’t just stick to the technical drama.

mschuster91• 6 months ago

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.

roland35• 6 months ago

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.

ptorrone18• 6 months ago

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...

analog312• 6 months ago

At least going between 3.3 and 5 Volts, they depend on the fab process used to make the chip. Fab capacity is more widely available for the lower voltages, making it inconvenient to keep supplying higher voltage chips. It has also gotten easier to do high performance analog at lower voltages.

Yeah, it's a pain. Many of my boards have both 3.3 and 5 Volt rails. There are quite a number of level-shifting logic buffers, for instance that are powered by 3.3 but accept 5-V inputs with no penalty.

For hobbyist type stuff, a 3.3 V CMOS chip will accept a 5 V logic signal if you feed it through a series resistor, since the built-in protection diodes of the CMOS chip will clamp the voltage. Don't let the engineers catch you doing it. ;-) But I often use a series resistor to provide a little bit of overload protection to a CMOS input.

Little or no logic ever operated at 24 V, other than relays. There's always some level translation needed there. The higher voltage follows the same rule as electric transmission lines: Correspondingly lower current allows for thinner wire, of importance if you're driving something like a solenoid valve.

Kaithar• 6 months ago

So back in the day ducks under thrown bottles and tomatoes we had the standard 4000 series on 3V-18V and life was grand. The CMOS chips, less grand.

Then we had the 7400 series around then too, and boy howdy did that product line proliferate. The BJT TTL families got in so many things, but it demanded Vcc of 5V +-5% and I think it is safe to say anything expected to work with those chips standardized on 5V. Great, everyone is agre— ah.

74C is a CMOS line that happily uses 3V-15V. Ok, we can ignore that one it's just a... Nevermind, 74HC and friends do 2V-6V, neat. But it still works with the 5V so we're great.

So, CMOS got better, we got gates down to 3V or less with competitive propagation timing, and it turns out that less power use is good for clocking, but we can't actually feed anything 3V because of voltage drop so it's 10% higher cause... someone figured that was a nice round number or something? As for why it keeps dropping... Thinner conductor channels, thinner insulation, you do the math. Yes, power consumption with more gates is a reason too, but I'm pinning the biggest blame badge on decreasing sizes in the process nodes.

Oh, you know all that already and want to know about just the sensor/interconnect split? My bad. Line drop, afaik. 3.3V signalling is fine on a PCB or when your wires are short. Want to move your sensors further away? Maybe 5V will be a tad more reliable. That sensor over 20m away? Sure, 24V sounds appealing. I don't know the exact lengths where voltage drop on the wiring is enough to cause issues but I'm pretty sure that kind of reasoning in why it persists beyond simple logic compatibility.

As a secondary concern of the same form, non-differential protocols are voltages you have knowledge and control of, the various kinds of line noise less so. A data line offset by a volt is more problematic at 3.3V than 24V

Oh and if I'm driving a small industrial motor or actuator, or a 400V rated relay, I definitely want to be doing so with more enthusiasm than 5V signifies. I also want less enthusiasm than electrocution cause I touched a logic line. 24V will (just about) generally not give you a meaningful shock unless you try to lick it.

alnwlsn5• 6 months ago

Why is your "open source Teensy" [0] just an RP2350 on a Teensy shaped board?

In my book, what makes a Teensy a Teensy is 1) hardware support, like 600Mhz clock, CAN, FPU, RTC, other hardware peripherals which the RP2350 lacks and 2) software compatibility with Paul Stoffregen's well documented Teensyduino libraries. I would not buy something else if I needed these features.

Do you plan to do a port? Why not build around the same IMXRT1062? Are you barred from buying Paul's bootloader chips [1]?

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

[1] https://www.pjrc.com/store/ic_mkl02_t4.html

rafram3• 6 months ago

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.

ptorrone18• 6 months ago

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?

ajross• 6 months ago

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.

mmmlinux2• 6 months ago

I thought the Teensys were made by PJRC. and they seem to list a number of US distributors on their website still. (including adafruit)

aobdev3• 6 months ago

I understand selling the Teensy line is out of your control, but what does “support” mean exactly in this context? Will related materials stay on your site?

I really hope this doesn’t lead to “boycott” of Teensy per se. I completely sympathize with tensions running high but please reconsider for the good of the community.

bityard2• 6 months ago

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.

vultour• 6 months ago

I'm not sure I can trust someone who seems completely oblivious to capital letters.

axus• 6 months ago

Links to "hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment"?

adolph4• 6 months ago

What are the impacts if any to the Stemma QT and Quiic ecosystems?

iancmceachern4• 6 months ago

I am a lifelong Sparkfun and Adafruit customer, I grew up and went to engineering school just down the street from Sparkfun.

This event will cause me to no longer be a Sparkfun customer.

There is no one that I have more respect for in this world than limor. She has done more for this industry, education and open source than anyone alive.

itomato4• 6 months ago

there would be no limor without nate. fact.

xyzzyxy8• 6 months ago

Hi phil, appreciate the supposed candor here. I'm just an uninvolved HN observer interested in piecing together all the details of this dispute, here are some follow-up questions:

- The first public claim is that you engaged in targeted social-media harassment of an individual ('discatte') [1], linking various personally-identifiable information to their public profile without consent (name, email and gmail profile pic), and further intentionally misgendering/dead-naming them after being made aware that this was harmful. Do you have any sort of public response to these claims, denying or apologizing for this behavior?

- The second public claim is that the email report you sent to Sparkfun [2] was not simply a 'report' of harassing actions, but itself crossed the line into further harassing behavior ('hi jerks', 'you monsters', etc). Did you really, as claimed, copy the former employee's fiancee's current employer in these email threads as well? Any other context on why this unrelated employer needed to be brought into your dispute?

- Not only SparkFun, but it appears you were also banned from Fossoton [3] for CoC violations related to the dispute with discatte, correct? Any other context on this ban?

- It appears that you also sent another user harassing messages to their Etsy account [4] after objecting to your 'doxxing' of discatte's personal information and blocking you elsewhere, and they reported to you Etsy's trust and safety team. Any other context on this separate incident of alleged harassment?

[1] https://digipres.club/@discatte/115600253924804026

[2] https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...

[3] https://gist.github.com/NPoole/8e128edb6e32986755450da9285b5...

[4] https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220

ptorrone18• 6 months ago

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.

jrflowers3• 6 months ago

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?

doktor2un• 6 months ago

Post the emails

kazinator• 6 months ago

We are now working on an open-source, Teensy-compatible board.

Yeah, right; the PCB art work looks in rather an advanced state of completion that has been in the works for a while due to the proverbial writing being on the wall.

More like, we have now given a brighter green light to our ongoing in-house project to eliminate the supply risk coming from Sparkfun, now that the shit has hit the fan ...

neilv• 6 months ago

@ptorrone, the forum drama is hard to follow, and maybe a little upset or sleep-deprived.

The blog post is OK (though maybe consider dropping the "We were informed...", and the addendum about "trying to drag"), but doesn't explain the forum drama about context.

In a skim of the forum, I saw only insufficient references to a context of problems and maybe improper behavior, scattered around. I couldn't get a good read on the context, after trying for longer than I think most people will.

If the company would like to explain more about the context, would it make sense to take a deep breath, and sit down with a PR advisor or lawyer, to figure out exactly what you want to say, and how? Do it very carefully, so you only have to do it once?

Or would the company like to drop the matter of that context, and move on, even though that would leave the confusing forum messages?

(Disclosure: Limor is a friend from our earlier hacker/MIT days, but I've not discussed this matter with her.)

shrubble• 6 months ago

Can you design with the STM32N657 at a good price point? 800mhz, maybe faster than the Teensy 4.1?

Kevcmk• 6 months ago

I live and DIE FOR ADAFRUIT

Seems plain that the PR Release was crafted with intent

hettygreen• 6 months ago

Hi Phil, sorry to hear that something went down and involved Limor... that's not cool. A few Q's:

1. Will the freenzy be a 100% drop-in replacement for the teensy?

2. Will the freenzy be able to be programmed using teensyduino?

3. PJRC's bootloader is closed-source (I know, I've built 1000 Teensy-LC's after the product's discontinuation). Does that mean you're sourcing bootloaders from PJRC or reverse engineering the bootloader chip?

Opinion 1: If I can't take code written for a Teensy and upload it straight to the Freenzy, then this is not "Teensy Compatible". Likewise if the pinout is not the same, including all of the rear pcb-pads.

Opinion 2: If this is not actually Teensy Compatible, but just "Teensy Inspired", what about branding this as adafruit's own microcontroller and not cut into Paul and Robin's income by selling a totally different product that rides on their name recognition and decade of work?

uyzstvqs• 6 months ago

Good response, but why did you toLowerCase() it? It looks unprofessional.

itomato4• 6 months ago

you just called out nate, which is the thing he specifically won't do to you, phil.

you have scraped sparkfun.com plenty. I know, I've seen the server logs.

regardless, there is no longer private drama.

Teknomadix• 6 months ago

Teensy's closed bootloader, USB stack, hardware design are what is proprietary. But the toolchain is open. Eg: I can use PlatformIO, etc. From my perspective an open alternative would splinter the community rather than replace it. Developers value Teensy's polish & consistency (PAnd this is Paul Stoffregen's discipline). If you endeavor to follow this path, you'd see adoption from transparency advocates and research/security-focused devs, but pragmatists like myself would stick with what works and what's affordable. Your real problem is replicating that engineering rigor in an open-source project, is a lot harder than it looks. Let me give an example; STM32 is more open but shows us exactly what fragmentation looks like without unified vision.

ptorrone18• 6 months ago

a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business, "This message is to formally confirm that SparkFun Electronics intends to issue applicable royalty payment for Q4 2025 no later than January 31, 2026, in accordance with previously established timelines."

i get it, they want to keep selling those products. this was probably about money and margins.

tpmoney2• 6 months ago

a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business,

The linked website indicates this decision was made on or around Jan 7. Your own liked page is dated for the 12. Unless you’re asserting that the decision was made and effective before Q4 2025, this sounds like them putting in writing that they intend to follow through on preexisting contractual obligations for prior sales. Not really “doing business with while not doing business” IMO.

iterance• 6 months ago

Hmm... reads a bit like an email a forum moderator might send a disobedient user. This seems strange, verging on unprofessional, for corporate communications.

skybrian• 6 months ago

I don’t know what’s going on, but I checked what Teensy is up to these days and it seems that last March they decided to outsource manufacturing and direct sales to SparkFun:

https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sparkfun-to-manufac...

torginus• 6 months ago

Drama aside, why would someone prefer Adafruit or Sparkfun products over much cheaper whitelabel alternatives from China?

A lot of those come with very good support and communities as well.

rcoder• 6 months ago

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.

relaxing3• 6 months ago

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.

mosura2• 6 months ago

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.

MallocVoidstar• 6 months ago

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).

parsimo2010• 6 months ago

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.

iancmceachern4• 6 months ago

Product support, documentation, comparability, and community support/forums

moregrist• 6 months ago

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.

analog312• 6 months ago

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.

fenwick672• 6 months ago

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

dec0dedab0de6• 6 months ago

Wait, does this mean that all adafruit items for sale on sparkfun.com are going to be on a clearance sale?

londons_explore• 6 months ago

Looks to me like they'll just dispose of the stock and not sell it.

burnte3• 6 months ago

"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...

HWR_14• 6 months ago

No, it means anything they haven't shipped by the end of the day is being cancelled as an order. So I'm guessing they have very little inventory in stock or adafruit is contractually required to buy it back.

burnte3• 6 months ago

adolph4• 6 months ago

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.

dec0dedab0de6• 6 months ago

That's the opposite, but also cool.

stego-tech3• 6 months ago

Gotta love corporate skub fights. Honestly neither side is coming out looking good here.

If you’re not doing business with someone anymore, just drop their products. You don’t owe folks an explanation other than “unfortunately we do not carry that product anymore.”

aobdev3• 6 months ago

It’s not just carrying their products. They are the exclusive producer of Teensy boards and are distributing them to many resellers but not to Adafruit.

stego-tech3• 6 months ago

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.

Y_Y3• 6 months ago

Are you one of those pro-skub hooligans?

https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/

stego-tech3• 6 months ago

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.

gadders• 6 months ago

I miss the days when we would get Ruby Drama like this every week.

Perz1val2• 6 months ago

Those guys migrated to Rust and are too busy pleasing the borrow checker now

deepriverfish• 6 months ago

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.

chaosprint• 6 months ago

I can't comment on this matter because I don't know the details. However, based on my personal experience consuming Adafruit products and their generous open-source approach, I personally trust Adafruit very much.

esskay• 6 months ago

Meh wish it was that simple, this paints at least part of their leadership as completely unhinged: https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877

We're only probably seeing part of the whole mess though.

zeofig• 6 months ago

Damn that's a considerable body of work.

Dangeranger3• 6 months ago

For context: This post by ptorrone suggests that leadership at Sparkfun has been engaged in a long running harassment campaign against the founder of AdaFruit (Limor Fried) and is now attempting to weaponize their CoC to cast blame on the victim in order to deflect from their own behavior[0].

    for anyone still reading:
    in july, we told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order. for years, sparkfun's leadership ignored specific behavior from leadership (and employees, now former... they had created and promoted hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment targeting limor, me, and others at adafruit. this was done on company time, shared, promoted. this was reported to them. it was documented and ignored. that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_

    months later in 2025, the same individual resurfaced and re-promoted it with what appears to be nate's blessing at the time. we again told sparkfun to deal with this. instead of addressing the behavior, sparkfun’s response was to “ban” adafruit from purchasing teensy by invoking a vague, secret set of rules that neither we nor paul (the creator of teensy) were allowed to see.

    this is not a one-off. nate (the founder of sparkfun) has done this before. anyone who has worked with him long enough knows this is how conflict is handled: deflect, escalate, and try to punish rather than deal with the underlying conduct.

    we do not respond to bullying by backing down. we never have. that is why we are here.

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

bob001• 6 months ago

For more context: There's also social media posts accusing ptorrone of engaging in harassment campaigns against other people.

xyzzyxy8• 6 months ago

For additional context to the context, here's Nick's account of the so-called 'long running harassment campaign' [1]: Nick made a joke site about Phil back in 2017, Phil emailed asking him to stop, Nick immediately transferred the domain to him with a heartfelt apology ("man... I just wanna be friends. I wanna support you and Limor and also feel good about the place that I work (and kinda live). [...] These social tools don't always translate, for that I apologize."), and they wrapped up the exchange on good terms.

[1] https://chaos.social/@North/115602441875664452

calvinmorrison5• 6 months ago

The only thing this public dispute tells me is I should never do business with either organization. What is with childish adults dragging "drama" into the public spotlight? What is a "Code of Conduct".

I would have privately let them know we arent going to supply them anymore and wish them the best. That's it.

Public drama is DISGUSTING!

threethirtytwo4• 6 months ago

Right, then why are you publicizing / dramatizing your own disgust?

calvinmorrison5• 6 months ago

tu quo que

dec0dedab0de6• 6 months ago

I think that there might be a tad of seasonal depression affecting them here. My initial reaction was basically excitement at the drama, but then I remembered that I need to take my vitamins.

It's sad to see two good companies go at it, but I do like the reminder that they are run by actual humans with emotions. This is why we support independent businesses instead of corporations that act like they are run by robots, and likely will be run by robots soon.

vegadw2• 6 months ago

I'm still trying to put all the pieces together, but https://digipres.club/@discatte/115588660312186707 sure paints Adafruit as the bad party here, though I'm open to information which shows otherwise to understand better.

notaustinpowers• 6 months ago

This whole thing just seems like two terrible people being terrible to each other and both vying for sympathy to be the less terrible person in this.

chinathrow• 6 months ago

Reading this, it looks like everyone needs a break.

RobotToaster2• 6 months ago

This adds some more context I guess https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877

Honestly the whole thing seems like everyone overreacting on both sides. Accusing someone is "doxing" because they used your first name?

buildbot2• 6 months ago

I believe they are claiming doxing based on connecting an email to a social media account.

relaxing3• 6 months ago

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.

rincebrain2• 6 months ago

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.

suobset• 6 months ago

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. :')

valdiorn3• 6 months ago

I have to say; they all sound like whining babies with the emotional integrity of a 13 year old hormonal teenager.

And these people run major businesses?

And the complaining about doxxing because he posted the person's email address? Grow up, mate.

ddtaylor2• 6 months ago

That looks like the usual social media victim style posting.

seu• 6 months ago

People seem to throw the words "doxxing" and "harassing" very lightly these days, if you ask me, although I'll give that nobody in this whole mess seems to be capable of calm or even non-violent communication.

cobalt60• 6 months ago

Nice take on creating a thread about freensy on SparkFun's own forum!

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

oytis7• 6 months ago

Why there is often so much drama whenever something open source or community is involved? The best we've got from the industry so far was Astronomer affair.

SiempreViernes• 6 months ago

It's just a selection effect, the culture of openness means you are much more likely to see the drama.

That said, why does the Musk vs. Zuckerberg cage fight beef not spring to mind? Or Musk beefing just about any random day anyway?

Not to mention the whole "OpenAI going full corpo" drama, that was arguably a much bigger deal, something actually important instead of this small social media debacle.

oytis7• 6 months ago

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

ddtaylor2• 6 months ago

I actually have a small lot of the Teensy boards for a USB hardware hacking project I was running for a while. For example, I used them to emulate a USB keyboard to automatically press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in Path of Exile over and over to avoid wrist strain during a time in that game where every player needed to constantly hit those keys in a loop to play at decently high levels.

These boards were an endless nightmare to work with. I had to cycle through many different USB controllers and it was really more like voodoo. I tried buying a few boards from different suppliers and every board had the same voodoo so I gave up and moved on.

I ended up getting ATtiny85 to work for what I wanted which sucked too, but at least it worked and was a fraction of the price so I could actually send them to all my friends.

hamburglar6• 6 months ago

As an uninformed observer, here is a possible sequence of events that sounds somewhat plausible based on what we know so far:

  * sparkfun employee engages in some shitty behavior (maybe harassment, maybe photoshops) toward adafruit CEO 
  * adafruit engages sparkfun to ask them to put a stop to it
  * employee leaves sparkfun
  * employee continues shitty behavior
  * adafruit continues to bug sparkfun about behavior 
  * sparkfun now has no control over employee, wants to wash their hands of it
  * adafruit isn’t happy with this resolution, continues to push it, interprets inaction as tacit approval
  * sparkfun cites CoC about private matters, inappropriate messages
  * HN speculates :)

nikdoof• 6 months ago

Honestly, if I received an email like this from the MD of a customer, I'd probably want to wash my hands of them as well

https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...

hamburglar6• 6 months ago

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.

account422• 6 months ago

Are these all teenagers?

ahepp3• 6 months ago

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.

skilning• 6 months ago

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

asddubs3• 6 months ago

Here's the ex-employees side of the story, complete with receipts (taken from another post on this story):

https://chaos.social/@North/115602127173454774

IMO what they did is pretty overblown. They did register a joke domain but basically folded and apologized immediately. Then nothing for 8 years, until they commented on a post where adafruit was accused of doxxing on mastodon.

cloudfudge3• 6 months ago

Wow, that really puts things in perspective.

Phil, based on this summary and reading the emails about what went down between you and Nick, you sound like an absolute lunatic. He mocked you once back in 2017. He set up a satirical website that had a single joke: you as obsessed detective, sniffing out perceived slights. Then, when called out on it, he very eloquently apologized for it, expanded on why he had done it, and offered an olive branch of friendship.

In response, you have absolutely flipped out on him. You've continuously attempted to expand his "crimes" into something against your wife, attempted to accuse him of misogyny, attempted to frame it as an attack on your kids, attempted to loop his employers into it, claimed you'd sue, and called him a bully. And later, when he made an offhand reference to this ordeal (to someone else you appear to be flipping out on), you accuse him of starting a new campaign of bullying. It's so completely out of scale that I have to question your mental state.

And the cherry on top is that in the middle of all this, you took a piece of information -- the fact that he has posted on social media about mental health issues -- and tried to leverage that into a claim that this is all his problem. I'm sorry, but that is absolutely disgusting behavior, and I hope you're ashamed of it.

drakythe• 6 months ago

Obviously we don't know details, and Phil has made an effort at responding. However, both statements are (deliberately?) vague, and Sparkfun's CoC is laughably short. I am all for the rules being "Don't be a dick" but such vagaries can hide arbitrary decisions. All the vagaries amount to "trust me, bro" statements and when two well loved groups (AdaFruit/Sparkfun) square up in a game of trust everyone loses, at least in the short term.

Hopefully this gets cleared up one way or another, in a clear way that means we won't be re-litigating this for the next decade.

fennecfoxy2• 6 months ago

Tbh I think both of y'all are a boon to people mucking about with hardware and that petty arguments, MBA parasite stuff, etc is all counterproductive but fight all you like.

I stopped buying stuff from SF/AF ages ago as I find it all overpriced for the most part (for my use cases). But then again I've not been doing too many hardware projects recently anyway.

Odd situation tho, both have been bastions of this stuff since forever.

daemonk• 6 months ago

I am unsure of the impact of this to the regular consumer as this seems like a pretty niche area. But it's kinda shitty that interpersonal relationships of two companies are impacting their customers negatively.

The onus is not up to public opinion or customer politics to resolve your schoolyard differences. We just want to buy your products and not get loaded with baggage. We don't owe you loyalty on top of the price we paid you for the product.

It's a bad look for the parties involved.

mikkupikku5• 6 months ago

Quite frankly, whenever I see people going the public CoC accusation route instead of talking things out man-to-man or simply parting ways politely, I see man children who never learned to resolve problems in a mature manner without running off to get Mom.

JuniperMesos• 6 months ago

Codes of conduct are an intersectional-feminist political demand, and are often explicitly justified in terms of protecting women and other marginalized demographics such as genderqueer people from what they view as harassment. Talking things out "man-to-man" is the opposite the discourse norm organizations with codes of conduct want to enforce.

qq66• 6 months ago

It's not clear from the top posts here what on Earth is happening. I've been a longtime customer of both Sparkfun and Adafruit for my kids. What do I need to know?

0xbadcafebee• 6 months ago

The only thing you need to know is Sparkfun doesn't distribute Adafruit products. There are other distributors you can find with a web search, or you can buy from Adafruit's website.

renewiltord2• 6 months ago

Yet another open source drama fest. Can’t be bothered. I’ll buy the best product at cheapest. I can use two stores.

verytrivial• 6 months ago

I tried to parse the history and it goes back to 2021 and apparently touches upon pronouns, NFTs, online unmasking and various online battles around the same. Sigh. Can we put this HN thread out of its misery, please?

kmbfjr• 6 months ago

C’mon people, act like adults. Your community and your customers care far less than you think.

If truly inexcusable behavior has ensued, there are better ways to handle it. An entire profession exists to resolve them.

ignaloidas• 6 months ago

Incredible how Adafruit-sided this discussion is, having seen ptorrone serially creating alt accounts fediverse to harrass people who thought that his behavior was bad [1], going as far as to harrass people on their Etsy stores [2]. I do not expect anything he says to be truthful at all, after having seen how much abuse he spews out.

[1] https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/115605021402124429 [2]: https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220

ptorrone18• 6 months ago

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

xyzzyxy8• 6 months ago

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

rlt• 6 months ago

I read a bunch of the relevant social media posts and emails and concluded that all parties are acting deeply childishly.

Nate shouldn’t have made a website with a domain name with Phil’s name and photoshopped meme, and brought it back up on social media years later.

Phil shouldn’t have been so aggressive in emailing Nate’s and his wife’s employers.

Sparkfun shouldn’t have overreacted by cutting off ties with Adafruit.

andromaton2• 6 months ago

Except Paul.

notthetup• 6 months ago

Paul feels like the only adult in this room.

asddubs3• 6 months ago

Nick is the person who made the website, not nate.

disqard• 6 months ago

I have always supported Adafruit -- Limor's principles shine through in the products, the website, the tutorials, and in the long-term track record of standing by their products. Even when I can source things from AliExpress, I often get them from Adafruit.

Speaking for myself, SparkFun has lost me as a customer.

thunderfork5• 6 months ago

Wait is this actually an extension of the ~Nov ptorrone mastodon cryfest/freakout? I was kind of hoping that whatever manic episode was behind that had come to a close.

MarcoDotIO• 6 months ago

So why haven't the emails been published? Or at the very least, summarizing the contents of the emails that specifically violate the Code of Conduct. I assume NDA reasons, but I could be wrong.

jujube3• 6 months ago

Another CoC fight.

adolph4• 6 months ago

Wow, what a way to celebrate the birthday of a certain tech CEO by crashing-out in a similar way. This is very disappointing.

barishnamazov• 6 months ago

It's amusing to me that the path for this announcement is "/official-response". That's a top level path with a generic name! :-)

ajb• 6 months ago

This is sad, and it doesn't reflect especially well on either party. Here's the thing, though: we evolved in a world where being expelled from the tribe was a death sentence. When people fall out, often their instinct is to try to preemptively convince everyone else that the other guy is the evil guy who should be kicked out. To convince everyone else to take a side.

We don't live in that world any more. You're not gonna die if you don't convince everyone that the other guy is the evil one. It's perfectly fine to decide that you just can't deal with someone else, and you can do that while accepting that you don't need everyone else to take a side or be convinced of your reasons.

userbinator• 6 months ago

Never cared much for either. Both are just insanely overpriced "maker" crap that ultimately comes from China anyway. You can get cheaper at AliExpress, LCSC etc.

throwaway815234• 6 months ago

Adafruit manufactures its own PCB's in New York, though the actual chips, leds, etc. come from wherever, which is often China.

1515511• 6 months ago

They assemble their PCBs in New York, there's no chance they are actually manufacturing the PCBs themselves there however. PCB manufacturing is an ecological disaster.

noncoml2• 6 months ago

This is embarrassing and doesn’t belong in HN

LeafItAlone3• 6 months ago

This is all just very disappointing.

SparkFun filled a very important gap for me during the downfall of RadioShack. Their Free Day was a source of excitement and goodies. Around the same time they realized the legal implications of Free Day and had to cancel it, (but not because of it) I started buying from Adafruit. Since then I’ve spent many thousands on their stuff. Even when I could get it cheaper elsewhere, I was OK spending more there because of their open source work. I even made a pilgrimage to their office when it was by Ground Zero.

I’m not sure I can find them now, but Sparkfun’s Nate has definitely posted public comments over the years that are not friendly to Adafruit, always clearly rooted in jealousy. One that comes to mind was him telling Adafruit to stop pretending they are an underdog and stop preening that they didn’t (at that point) have millions in sales. I totally believe Adafruit’s account of what Sparkfun was doing.

At the same time, Phil has always rubbed me the wrong way to - too aggressive and a bit rude, even in their own forums, including where they provide customer support on orders. The threads shared of his egregious behavior do not shock me in the least.

I guess this is a good of a reason as any to stop supporting both. I’ll save thousands and I won’t have a continuously growing supply of components for projects I’ll never get around to.

angst_ridden• 6 months ago

Ignoring all this drama.

But I've always found Paul to be a good guy, who was helpful and honest and provided a great product. Teensy is a great platform, and it's too bad these other players will have a negative impact on it.

1shooner• 6 months ago

This makes me think of Park Tools. Park sells bicycle tools. They design and produce an amazing breadth of products. They also produce an incredibly valuable library of instructional content about how to use these tools. Calvin Jones, their director of education, just announced his retirement after 28 years.

Anyway, they just teach you how to do the thing. They somehow haven't gotten into internet squabbles with their suppliers or retailers. I would just call it professional.

garbagewoman2• 6 months ago

Why does this make you think of park tools?

Brian_K_White7• 6 months ago

Since any such CoC violation is very much merely a claim and not a fact, this should probably be flagged.

andromaton2• 6 months ago

Probably the key to eventual clarity is at PJRC's forum. PJRC makes Teensy. Imho it's a great product, and the owner, Paul Stoffregen, a great engineer and person from my experience using their products.

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

My summary:

1. SparkFun and Adafruit are in conflict 2. SparkFun manufactures Teensy under license from PJRC 3. SparkFun cuts off Adafruit as a reseller 4. Adafruit can no longer sell Teensy 5. Adafruit posts on PJRC forum announcing an open-source Teensy competitor 6. Paul posts that it's outrageous in terms of etiquette that they're announcing a competitor on his forum. Adafruit's own forum only allows discussion of Adafruit products.

He's allowing it despite mixed feelings.

nerdile• 6 months ago

? This may be one of those "90% of the audience doesn't care and is increasingly less likely to buy from either vendor the more they fight in public" situations

DetroitThrow2• 6 months ago

Paul is awesome. Seems to be stuck in the middle of Adafruit and SparkFun duking it out.

camb416• 6 months ago

Such drama. I’m going back to BX-24s and dusting off the 1st edition Igoe book.

arthurcolle• 6 months ago

Feels like a breakup. Damn that sucks, can you get a mediator maybe?

Think of the children...

Animats• 6 months ago

So the drama.

What do I read to find out what this is about? And should I care?

simgt• 6 months ago

It's all here in the comments, go ahead if you're entertained by high drama people trying to convince a crowd that they're on the good side. My main takeaway is that the lady with pink hair who made Adafruit and the guy who designs Teensy seem to be bystanders in this but end up both losing.

fhub• 6 months ago

It feels to me like this should have gone through private arbitration rather than public accusations.

likiiio• 6 months ago

I can't care less about what lead to this drama, but threatening people for building a compatible product is a shit move, sparkfun. They have every right to do this.

Not buying anything from you anymore until you back off from this stupid claim. Shame on you.

phendrenad22• 6 months ago

Oh I missed that detail, where did they threaten?

phendrenad22• 6 months ago

Wow, after following all of the links here, and wrap my head around this thing, it's hard to shake the feeling that this is merely the start of what will surely be a long and epic drama.

vasco4• 6 months ago

Seeing how Adafruit recently misrepresented the Arduino acquisition to FUD people this is not surprising to me. Around 15 years ago they had great vibes but the recent stuff is just money grabbing.

dryark• 6 months ago

I find this political mess to be interesting, but I'm not sure it's an appropriate topic of conversation for the "professional community."

It looks to me like people on both sides were bothering the other over and extended period of time and it got worse till it led to this.

Having seen similar over my career I don't understand what digging into this accomplishes besides making all sides more upset.

I do think it is wrong for the professional relationship ( continuing to sell technology ) to be ended over a personal dispute.

From where I stand it looks like Phil is attempting to defend himself by being open about what happened even though the whole situation seems unpleasant.

Besides that I think it is likely best if all sides in this just cease communicating or saying anything more and move on from the personal stuff.

My two cents.

KronisLV• 6 months ago

Without oversharing, recent violations include

I feel like this prevents me from trusting them, since I’ve no idea what was actually said.

Do overshare, remove victim’s information, obviously, but put who did what out there.

Same for any rebuttals, you better bring receipts instead of some vague accusations.

elzbardico• 6 months ago

As someone from Generation-X, all of this is wildly amusing to me. Yes, I am getting old.

c64d81744074dfa• 6 months ago

sigh Mom and Dad are fighting...

But seriously, this illustrates to me that Codes of Conduct are mostly suspect. This is obviously a private feud (nobody looks to be in the right here and I don't care who started what), so to pull "they violated the CoC" is pure theatre and bullshit. I'm a Sparkfun customer and I find that really disappointing.

4ggr0• 6 months ago

after reading all of these mastodon threads and gists, something really irks me.

this ptorrone guy acts in some pretty questionable ways and constantly uses his wife and kids as a shield. if someone gets harassed out of nowhere and their kids or spouses are being dragged into it, then that's truly a horrible, shitty thing to do. but to be involved in and start flame-wars, doxxing campaigns and more and then constantly having to mention that you have a newborn when people push back sounds pretty manipulative.

smacks someone on their neck, "don't hit me back, man, i got kids and a wife!"

SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

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