It's bad enough that we are bombarded with so many scam e-mails,phone calls and letters these days.But you also need to be on the lookout for dodgy products.Sometimes we order products from suppliers that we haven't dealt with before,either because we can't find them elsewhere or when there are delivery delays with our usual suppliers,only to receive either counterfeits or poorly-designed clones.Often,we pay the same for these dodgy parts as we would for the genuine articles.For example,we purchased some batches of 74HC595 logic chips for our LED Christmas Tree kits(which were resoundingly popular).We ordered batches from different suppliers in case some of them were delayed,as we needed to get them in customers' hands well before Christmas,giving them time to build the trees.Many of the chips we received were fine.But a couple of batches were faulty.And I don't just mean one or two chips;out of hundreds of chips,none of them worked.The dud chips came from at least two different suppliers but they all had the same date code etched in the top,along with a Texas Instruments logo.That certainly doesn't guarantee they were actually made by TI,though!
展开▼
