A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

[EasyGoing1]

This is what I ordered ...






This is what I received ...

[redwire]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

That sucks, I hate waiting many weeks only to get something silly.
I try to avoid stores around 95% or less feedback on Ali, they seem to be idiots or scammers. I couldn't find the "G-Tank store", maybe it's the "G-String store" that sells these?

Out of the 800+ stores selling RP2040's you didn't go for the lowest price I hope. Many of them confuse the IC with the board etc, so I only order from stores specializing in selling electronics components, it seems to help.
But these stores are a shell game, i.e Alice0365 etc. there are a dozen Alice stores and she usually sells junky stuff at high price.

[EasyGoing1]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

That sucks, I hate waiting many weeks only to get something silly.
I try to avoid stores around 95% or less feedback on Ali, they seem to be idiots or scammers. I couldn't find the "G-Tank store", maybe it's the "G-String store" that sells these?

Out of the 800+ stores selling RP2040's you didn't go for the lowest price I hope. Many of them confuse the IC with the board etc, so I only order from stores specializing in selling electronics components, it seems to help.
But these stores are a shell game, i.e Alice0365 etc. there are a dozen Alice stores and she usually sells junky stuff at high price.

See now I have to find a project where I can design a PCB for these ... lol

[stj]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

did you actually select the pi boards? i notice thats one of those anoying sellers with one page and many products

[redwire]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

Only 2 reviews... seems dodgy.
The store is silly, with headers it's double the price of just the 2040 board.

OP can you get a refund or not. You aren't getting a board for $0.99, that's the IC price.

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

I wonder if those chips are even real, sometimes I wonder if sellers assume you can't do anything with BGA chips and send you dummy chips and hope you just eat the loss from the order mistake... ouch.

[stj]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

most chip sellers dont even know what they have - they just get a reel of chips from the shenzen market and re-sell them.

there is video of that market - amazing place.
10 floors of nothing but electronic components and sub assembly's

[redwire]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

It's the market place - vendors pick up stuff from other vendors and resell. chinese stores will sell anything, they don't stick to any category. Pantyhose, LED's, IC's lol.

At least it appears legit, latest silicon revision is B2. But the laser marking is a bit crude.
I miss the days when IC's had pins. Really, for $1 this part puts to shame other MCU's but few people will use it raw, I couldn't solder a QFN-56 without it bubbling all over the place, flux on that ground pad.
Strange the RP2040 contains no FLASH memory, it side loads code from an external SPI FLASH.
The A/D still performs poorly, not even 9 bits, with no internal reference.

[EasyGoing1]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

did you actually select the pi boards? i notice thats one of those anoying sellers with one page and many products

In that screenshot that I linked ... I just increased the QTY and purchased ... I didn't see an option to choose chips vs boards...

[EasyGoing1]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

It's the market place - vendors pick up stuff from other vendors and resell. chinese stores will sell anything, they don't stick to any category. Pantyhose, LED's, IC's lol.

At least it appears legit, latest silicon revision is B2. But the laser marking is a bit crude.
I miss the days when IC's had pins. Really, for $1 this part puts to shame other MCU's but few people will use it raw, I couldn't solder a QFN-56 without it bubbling all over the place, flux on that ground pad.
Strange the RP2040 contains no FLASH memory, it side loads code from an external SPI FLASH.
The A/D still performs poorly, not even 9 bits, with no internal reference.

The crudeness in the print could be an anomaly of the macro lens that I clipped onto my cell phone when i*took the picture ... $15 macro lens and all ...

I thought the same about one board flash ... I mean did NOT including flash save money in the manufacturing? I would think that going external would be more expensive in the long run ... but what do I know about chip manufacturing ... nothing!

I'm fairly confident that I could solder these chips. I have a nice hot air station that has never let me down... just need to find a project that will let me justify designing a board around the processors ... but ... they aren't going anywhere and have no expiration date and will be more than useful years from now, I'm sure.

[EasyGoing1]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

I wonder if those chips are even real, sometimes I wonder if sellers assume you can't do anything with BGA chips and send you dummy chips and hope you just eat the loss from the order mistake... ouch.

I could sacrifice one ... figure out which pins do power and see if any of the pins would give me a signal I could read on the scope when powered on ...

OP can you get a refund or not. You aren't getting a board for $0.99, that's the IC price.

I just thought it was one of those "too good to be true" deals that I hear about all the time but never seem to be lucky enough to take advantage of... and the pictures and the description indicate NO WHERE that it's just the chip.

I COULD get a refund but on a $15 purchase ... is it worth my time? NOPE!

there is video of that market - amazing place.
10 floors of nothing but electronic components and sub assembly's

Did a youtube search but found nothing ... got a link?

[stj]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

In that screenshot that I linked ... I just increased the QTY and purchased ... I didn't see an option to choose chips vs boards...

then your browser is shit
happened to a friend with an iphone!

look at all the little pictures under the price - miss-labelled as "color"
those are the items to choose between!

[stj]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

I could sacrifice one ... figure out which pins do power and see if any of the pins would give me a signal I could read on the scope when powered on ...



I just thought it was one of those "too good to be true" deals that I hear about all the time but never seem to be lucky enough to take advantage of... and the pictures and the description indicate NO WHERE that it's just the chip.

I COULD get a refund but on a $15 purchase ... is it worth my time? NOPE!



Did a youtube search but found nothing ... got a link?

https://huntersourcing.com/shenzhen-electronics-market/
https://www.travelchinaguide.com/cit...ics-market.htm

[sam_sam_sam]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

AliExpress is the worst about having the color option for some item and it sometimes not clear exactly what you are getting with a given option really

One note to be aware of is that I order something that had an option to get four of the same exact item but they are shipping it in two separate boxes for some reason but they do not tell you that this is the case until you have two different tracking numbers

And the tracking number information is very slow to update as well

[EasyGoing1]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

then your browser is shit
happened to a friend with an iPhone!
look at all the little pictures under the price - miss-labelled as "color"
those are the items to choose between!

I've been a network engineer for over 20 years. I used the Internet back when Mozilla was text based as was the "WEB" ... I write software ... from scratch ... I use Chrome on MacOS ... if these "options" were masked in color selections that were made available to me, I would have seen them ... but as you can see ... there are no options for color choices and the "More options" link in this screenshot only provides a selection of shipping methods. as you can see in the second screen shot.

And though Google Chrome is arguably a shitty browser, that shit is only applicable as far as the browser is invasive to my personal data and preferences etc. In terms of technical ability to be a fully capable browser that can accurately show what a web server is kicking back to the browser ... Chrome tends to be the defacto standard in that context...

[stj]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

post the link

[diif]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

Go to your order page and check the order, that will show what you actually ordered.

[redwire]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

That screen cap shows the "color" is not selected, it's not highlighted. Once you click there, then the pic changes to show what you've ordered and highlighted window around the "color", as in this pic.
Default load of the webpage leaves (cursor) you on the bottom left which is just the picture gallery.

[EasyGoing1]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

https://huntersourcing.com/shenzhen-electronics-market/

I've never seen anything like this before. It is simply amazing! A few things that stood out to me:

1) We got NOTHING on china in terms of western retail culture
2) I only saw one person smoking
3) The shop owners clearly have ZERO worries about their products being shoplifted. I assume the penalties for shoplifting in China must be extreme.

[EasyGoing1]

Re: A Cautionary Tale - Alli Express

post the link

Here is the link