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.
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."
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.
> sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.
Ok sure, but the explanation provided strikes me as equally vague. I don't think anyone who isn't familiar with this situation has any idea what the hell is going on between these two orgs tbh.
If a dispassionate observer can't figure out situation without significant effort, then it's very easy to handwave this away as unimportant.
Personally I'd very much hate for that to happen here if something truly noteworthy happened.
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.
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.
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.
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]?
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?
Thanks for the answer. I know many are scared off by the closed bootloader of the teensy (though I feel it's a fair thing to do). The lack of on-chip debugging is another shortcoming the Teensys have.
I've been working on an audio project recently, and the the ease of use and feature set that TeensyAudio has is incredible.
Teensy 4 does currently fill a pretty unique niche in terms of processing power though. There isn't much like it outside of professional eval boards.
I think this is a bit tone-deaf the reason why the teensy is so desirable is because of its raw power in such a neat package. The RP2350 is great but if I wanted that I would just purchase it rather than the Freensy
Right, but you're not really competing on processor speed. You're competing on maturity of peripherals where the RP doesn't really match up PIO or not.
Edit: I see you're comparing it to the 3.2 but I suspect most folks are going to be comparing your offering to the 4.x.
Yeah - I don't really consider this comparable for my uses which rely heavily on the DSP and processing power of the Teensy itself either.
Drama and whatnot aside I'm not really sure why anyone would buy the (considerably more expensive) Teensy over something RP based if RP was suitable for their needs already.
Interestingly despite being a Teensy fan I have found myself reaching more towards the RP when I can because I can't stand the Arduino API and much prefer the RP SDK. I do use Teensy without Teensyduino (Makefile based) and also a bit of the CMSIS-DSP stuff directly - but it's kinda clunky IMO.
it will have benefits over the 4.x - we can always spin up a version with the iMX chipset (we have a metro board with the little sister chip, iMX RT1011 already in stock) - tbh if we did something with the iMX RT106x we'd probably start with a Metro (Arduino-shield compatible) or Feather board since that's a super-popular pinout.
either way, more hardware is better and we don't want to just give people the same-old-same-old... as we mentioned there's lots of things that we can add to make the board useful to people: SWD, USB C, Lipoly batt, onboard storage, neopixel LED, etc). what peripheral/library are you specifically concerned about?
If you replace the Teensy 4.x it would have to be something very close to the same pinout, foot print, cost and features otherwise it would just be a new product. Ideally you would find a way to source the Teensy directly bypassing Sparkfun.
> 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.
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.
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.
That is exactly how I understand it at the moment. And depending on the material, it would be a somewhat valid complaint, if the report included the material without prior warning. Though, not valid enough to call CoC on this, IMHO.
It would only be at all valid if it was forwarded to employees who weren’t in a customer facing role.
Saying that you’re required to give a content warning to an account manager for material related to your business relationship puts the burden of responsibility onto the victim. Dealing with the psychological impact is the responsibility of their employer, not the customer.
No, even in a customer-facing role, you won't have to put up with every s**. I mean, it's a business for electronics, not a porn-shop or moderation for explicit material at some social media-platform. There should be a line on what they have to tolerate.
>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.
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.
Weird that your STT doesn't handle capitals, but that's a good excuse. Sounds like you're having a challenging day, I hope my snarky joke wasn't too annoying.
You are doing damage control on a public forum. Your writing should be precise and neat if you don't wish to appear unprofessional and goaded into responding. Normally, badly written prose is just annoying; here it is harmful to your cause.
It is clearly a deliberate choice to send the signal of conforming to a particular type of non-conformance. It’s a costly signal because most people will see it as having the emotional maturity of a child, it signals to others that given their social status they can afford that self imposed handicap.
I heard that altman does it. I don't care about him enough to check though. More silly gimmicks like holmes talking in a mans voice or jobs wearing the same turtle neck
How it's perceived is no doubt in the eye of the beholder. I can totally see how some people would associate this writing style with children, and so associate it with "vulnerable".
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?
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.
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.
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...
Ooh thank you! I often forget that everything is a capacitor/resistor/inductor all at once and i see how at higher frequencies that starts to matter! I think the 24v stuff is also more low frequency signaling over longer distances so rise/fall time is less of a worry but voltage drop / noise is perhaps more of one. Thanks!
Fwiw, I’m team adafruit on this. Hope it works out for y’all
> 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.
4 to 20mA signaling is only the start of a very specific rabbit hole. Someone had the brilliant idea to encode digital signals on top of the analog current loop. The result is the HART communication protocol, which is old, bloated, confusing, quirky - and it is really popular in industrial automation.
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.
The one thing I know is that for threads such as this one it is best to ignore all of the stuff from accounts made just for the purpose of participating in the thread.
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.
It just dawned on me that CoC docs are basically HR for open source. Point to a violation and voila, that person is gone. “Sorry, nothing personal, CoC violation, there’s nothing I can do”.
Exactly. Without a CoC the persons making hard decisions have to stand behind them. With a CoC they can hide behind the CoC and wash their hands in innocence. This lowers the barrier for making questionable decisions and overall decreases honesty. We've seen this with the suspension of Python core maintainer Tim Peters.
They're a weapon of "social justice" - 90% of CoC rules are common-sense stuff that doesn't have to be said, combined with one or two "progressive" ideas shoehorned in.
Communities were doing just fine without a CoC up until they became a trend. People got banned too but the moderators couldn't hide behind a CoC to justify questionable decisions.
This is like saying "overall laws are bad" because whoever is applying them is doing so maliciously. Even in the absence of COC companies like this always find a way to justify this sort of pressure. If not a COC, it's a TOS or NDA or whatever document acronym you can find.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This would mean admitting the allegations are 100% true and harming their business even more with the risk of losing it all in worst case. Now we can assume it's not as simple as SparkFun makes it. It's a dirty situation, but necessary, and justified if they are really a victim.
> but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.
SparkFun started the war, AdaFruit seem to only defend here.
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.
What kind of blog gets flooded by what, 10/100 req/s at max? Seems somewhere along the line we forgot how to deploy and run infrastructure on the internet, if some basic scrapers manage to down your website.
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.
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.
There certainly could be harm if it's false though, which is the whole point. And they did not give any information to affirm who's fault (if anyone) it was besides hearsay
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.
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
There is no right to privacy, but they may have an NDA. Also, if they get too specific, they could open themselves up to a libel lawsuit. Though, if they were consulting a lawyer I don't think there would be any release. Simply cut business ties, and move on, it happens all the time, and would leave room to patch things up later.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Hmm... reads a bit like an email a forum moderator might send a disobedient user. This seems strange, verging on unprofessional, for corporate communications.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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_
Does anyone have an example of one of these "hate sites" that Sparkfun employees allegedly created? That sounds curious. And possibly politically loaded, since the word "hate" has been weaponised to mean all sorts of things, like for example, any positive mention of Donald Trump.
On a maybe-related note, I see Adafruit is a heavily identitarian company built around a strident "girl boss" with the purple hair and piercing. I'm getting a whiff of far-left activism.
> Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT engineer, Limor "Ladyada" Fried ... Adafruit has expanded offerings to include tools, equipment, and electronics that Limor personally selects, tests, and approves before going in to the Adafruit store. Adafruit is a 100% woman owned manufacturing company, a certified Minority and Woman-owned Business Enterprise (M/WBE), a certified Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE), and WOSB ... Limor was named a White House Champion of Change in 2016
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
You're absolutely correct and it's me who has mis-read that part. The point of the oddly relaxed wording on sexual images and behaviour still stands though!
> sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic
Well if someone was working on something like a medical device there might be some documentation that could be interpreted as sexual but that documenting it was not gratuitous.
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!
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."
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.
See additional context for the accusation(s) here[0].
[0] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
> sparkfun chose to publish a vague public accusation. once you do that, speculation is inevitable.
Ok sure, but the explanation provided strikes me as equally vague. I don't think anyone who isn't familiar with this situation has any idea what the hell is going on between these two orgs tbh.
If a dispassionate observer can't figure out situation without significant effort, then it's very easy to handwave this away as unimportant.
Personally I'd very much hate for that to happen here if something truly noteworthy happened.
still vague as hell lol
I need to see the photoshops!
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.
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.
Reppin my free coaster and keeb board. Reminds me of Hitec who would send candy with their transmitters.
Also all their docs man great for noobs like me starting out and libraries.
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.
Seems to be the inevitable trend... Just in recent times: Pebble drama, Arduino joining the dark side, now Sparkfun & Adafruit. End of an era
we are sticking with open source, arduino has moved away from that and sparkfun has an open-source certification revoked due to not being open source.
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
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?
Thanks for the answer. I know many are scared off by the closed bootloader of the teensy (though I feel it's a fair thing to do). The lack of on-chip debugging is another shortcoming the Teensys have.
I've been working on an audio project recently, and the the ease of use and feature set that TeensyAudio has is incredible.
Teensy 4 does currently fill a pretty unique niche in terms of processing power though. There isn't much like it outside of professional eval boards.
I think this is a bit tone-deaf the reason why the teensy is so desirable is because of its raw power in such a neat package. The RP2350 is great but if I wanted that I would just purchase it rather than the Freensy
Right, but you're not really competing on processor speed. You're competing on maturity of peripherals where the RP doesn't really match up PIO or not.
Edit: I see you're comparing it to the 3.2 but I suspect most folks are going to be comparing your offering to the 4.x.
Yeah - I don't really consider this comparable for my uses which rely heavily on the DSP and processing power of the Teensy itself either.
Drama and whatnot aside I'm not really sure why anyone would buy the (considerably more expensive) Teensy over something RP based if RP was suitable for their needs already.
Interestingly despite being a Teensy fan I have found myself reaching more towards the RP when I can because I can't stand the Arduino API and much prefer the RP SDK. I do use Teensy without Teensyduino (Makefile based) and also a bit of the CMSIS-DSP stuff directly - but it's kinda clunky IMO.
it will have benefits over the 4.x - we can always spin up a version with the iMX chipset (we have a metro board with the little sister chip, iMX RT1011 already in stock) - tbh if we did something with the iMX RT106x we'd probably start with a Metro (Arduino-shield compatible) or Feather board since that's a super-popular pinout.
either way, more hardware is better and we don't want to just give people the same-old-same-old... as we mentioned there's lots of things that we can add to make the board useful to people: SWD, USB C, Lipoly batt, onboard storage, neopixel LED, etc). what peripheral/library are you specifically concerned about?
If you replace the Teensy 4.x it would have to be something very close to the same pinout, foot print, cost and features otherwise it would just be a new product. Ideally you would find a way to source the Teensy directly bypassing Sparkfun.
sparkfun is the single source supplier (and now maker of the product).
Spinning an IMXRT1062/IMXRT1064 design sans the terrible Teensy bootloader should take a day or two at most.
These chips have perfectly-fine ROM USB bootloaders and SWD, don't ruin them by adding extra garbage.
There is a place for a cheaper 5v tolerant microcontroller, but that’s more of a commodity space and probably not worth competing in for most.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That is exactly how I understand it at the moment. And depending on the material, it would be a somewhat valid complaint, if the report included the material without prior warning. Though, not valid enough to call CoC on this, IMHO.
It would only be at all valid if it was forwarded to employees who weren’t in a customer facing role.
Saying that you’re required to give a content warning to an account manager for material related to your business relationship puts the burden of responsibility onto the victim. Dealing with the psychological impact is the responsibility of their employer, not the customer.
No, even in a customer-facing role, you won't have to put up with every s**. I mean, it's a business for electronics, not a porn-shop or moderation for explicit material at some social media-platform. There should be a line on what they have to tolerate.
Yeah this is how I read it as well.
>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.
Have you also be embargoed from buying shift keys?
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.
I needed a good laugh today and "reading about embezzlement charges for Sesame Street characters" gave me it, so: thanks!
Levar Burton did get into some hot water over the Reading Rainbow app.
speech to text, with a newborn, replying to these and feeding her. i cannot purchase shift keys if they are on sparkfun, yes.
Weird that your STT doesn't handle capitals, but that's a good excuse. Sounds like you're having a challenging day, I hope my snarky joke wasn't too annoying.
> I hope my snarky joke wasn't too annoying
Don't worry, he always writes like this.
I think it's a trend among tech founders, I've seen some on Twitter doing it, and then a bunch of hanger-ons copying the behavior.
Congratulations! (assuming you're the parent)
If not, congratulations on the heist.
Perhaps a foot pedal? Maybe Adafruit could make one.
Looking at your comment history, it’s clear that you’re lying. You simply don’t care.
You are doing damage control on a public forum. Your writing should be precise and neat if you don't wish to appear unprofessional and goaded into responding. Normally, badly written prose is just annoying; here it is harmful to your cause.
*poorly written prose
valuing style over substance is folly.
It is clearly a deliberate choice to send the signal of conforming to a particular type of non-conformance. It’s a costly signal because most people will see it as having the emotional maturity of a child, it signals to others that given their social status they can afford that self imposed handicap.
Perhaps but in this case the style does make it harder to read the substance.
Typing in all lowercase makes you look more vulnerable, it's a pretty common rhetorical tactic in PR.
I had never noticed this before. Can you point at any examples?
I have long noticed high profile people going to court with some kind of cast on, though.
I heard that altman does it. I don't care about him enough to check though. More silly gimmicks like holmes talking in a mans voice or jobs wearing the same turtle neck
Uh, no, it makes you look careless and unprofessional.
How it's perceived is no doubt in the eye of the beholder. I can totally see how some people would associate this writing style with children, and so associate it with "vulnerable".
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?
This needs a response, and my opinion will certainly be up in the air until I hear an explanation (or lack thereof) from AdaFruit.
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.
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.
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...
Ooh thank you! I often forget that everything is a capacitor/resistor/inductor all at once and i see how at higher frequencies that starts to matter! I think the 24v stuff is also more low frequency signaling over longer distances so rise/fall time is less of a worry but voltage drop / noise is perhaps more of one. Thanks!
Fwiw, I’m team adafruit on this. Hope it works out for y’all
> 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.
4 to 20mA signaling is only the start of a very specific rabbit hole. Someone had the brilliant idea to encode digital signals on top of the analog current loop. The result is the HART communication protocol, which is old, bloated, confusing, quirky - and it is really popular in industrial automation.
don't forget 0-10v and 2-10v analog signals.
Wouldn't be the first time CoC was used as a lame attempt to harm open source.
Thanks for speaking up.
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.
The one thing I know is that for threads such as this one it is best to ignore all of the stuff from accounts made just for the purpose of participating in the thread.
Are you HR or something?
Nah but I recognize that HR, unfortunately, has to exist for larger organizations.
Unless you have an infinitely wise and patient dictator who can just say "you're an asshole, you go" and always make the right call or something.
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.
It just dawned on me that CoC docs are basically HR for open source. Point to a violation and voila, that person is gone. “Sorry, nothing personal, CoC violation, there’s nothing I can do”.
Exactly. Without a CoC the persons making hard decisions have to stand behind them. With a CoC they can hide behind the CoC and wash their hands in innocence. This lowers the barrier for making questionable decisions and overall decreases honesty. We've seen this with the suspension of Python core maintainer Tim Peters.
They're a weapon of "social justice" - 90% of CoC rules are common-sense stuff that doesn't have to be said, combined with one or two "progressive" ideas shoehorned in.
Overall I wish we lived in a world where they are not needed. But in every community, some people are assholes so they are often needed.
It just means you get different kinds of assholes who are better at navigating around the CoC or even weaponizing it.
Communities were doing just fine without a CoC up until they became a trend. People got banned too but the moderators couldn't hide behind a CoC to justify questionable decisions.
This is like saying "overall laws are bad" because whoever is applying them is doing so maliciously. Even in the absence of COC companies like this always find a way to justify this sort of pressure. If not a COC, it's a TOS or NDA or whatever document acronym you can find.
This is nothing to do with Code of Conduct and just one business chosing not to do business with another.
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?
I'm not sure I can trust someone who seems completely oblivious to capital letters.
No questions. Just move on. Engaging in public spectacle isn't a good look for anyone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have feeling it will only hurt PJRC in the end for trusting sparkfun to sell and manage the teensy "brand"
What are the impacts if any to the Stemma QT and Quiic ecosystems?
Links to "hate sites, photoshopped images, and harassment"?
I thought the Teensys were made by PJRC. and they seem to list a number of US distributors on their website still. (including adafruit)
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.
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.
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.
> "We wish Sparkfun the best of luck"
This would mean admitting the allegations are 100% true and harming their business even more with the risk of losing it all in worst case. Now we can assume it's not as simple as SparkFun makes it. It's a dirty situation, but necessary, and justified if they are really a victim.
> but the post you are responding to is clearly looking for a public fight.
SparkFun started the war, AdaFruit seem to only defend here.
Why do I need to prove I'm human to read your blog?
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.
Because AI scraping is everywhere and flooding sites with useless traffic. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best people can do atm
What kind of blog gets flooded by what, 10/100 req/s at max? Seems somewhere along the line we forgot how to deploy and run infrastructure on the internet, if some basic scrapers manage to down your website.
"It's not ideal" is an understatement, I have to do stupid captchas for about half my Google searches.
Because of enshitification of the internet you now need to solve puzzles before you can access websites. Welcome to 2026.
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.
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.
What would you have them publish instead? Your curiosity does not overcome the right to privacy of those involved.
> 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.
nobody wants corporate speak. They are saying they are cutting ties and it's not their fault. No harm in that if it's true.
There certainly could be harm if it's false though, which is the whole point. And they did not give any information to affirm who's fault (if anyone) it was besides hearsay
> 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.
Yes, but Sparkfun didn't "release nothing", and now they are opening themselves up to a libel suit.
It would have been far better had they not published anything at this point.
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.
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
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
> 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.
There is no right to privacy, but they may have an NDA. Also, if they get too specific, they could open themselves up to a libel lawsuit. Though, if they were consulting a lawyer I don't think there would be any release. Simply cut business ties, and move on, it happens all the time, and would leave room to patch things up later.
"they could open themselves up to a libel lawsuit."
They already have.
Nothing. They could just cut ties and be done with it.
It seems like releasing more would have probably broken the exact same rules they are claiming AdaFruit broke.
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.
Don’t attention whore on the internet if you want privacy.
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.
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.
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?
I believe they are claiming doxing based on connecting an email to a social media account.
Isn’t that a built in feature of most social media platforms?
Consensually, typically.
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.
Reading this, it looks like everyone needs a break.
Wow that’s not great…
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.
That looks like the usual social media victim style posting.
The URL for this page is very generic and bound to become a 404 page. Thinking about URLs is important to prevent link rot.
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.
The URL for this page is clearly a knee-jerk reaction. I don't expect it will survive the week.
Agreed. Because of this (and regardless), archive everything:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260114140733/https://www.spark...
Almost like it's by design.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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-...
Yeah but this post is not necessarily the truth. This person has ahem interesting history. https://chaos.social/@North/115605819126197877
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Dig under all of this garbage and all you'll find is a few employees mad about their gender or something. What a waste of everyones time involved.
Hmm... reads a bit like an email a forum moderator might send a disobedient user. This seems strange, verging on unprofessional, for corporate communications.
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.
Nice take on creating a thread about freensy on SparkFun's own forum!
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
I miss the days when we would get Ruby Drama like this every week.
Those guys migrated to Rust and are too busy pleasing the borrow checker now
As an uninformed observer, here is a possible sequence of events that sounds somewhat plausible based on what we know so far:
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...
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.
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.
Wait, does this mean that all adafruit items for sale on sparkfun.com are going to be on a clearance sale?
"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...
> 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.
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.
"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...
Looks to me like they'll just dispose of the stock and not sell it.
"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...
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].
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...For more context: There's also social media posts accusing ptorrone of engaging in harassment campaigns against other people.
> 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.
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.
That certainly doesn't come off well for SparkFun.
From: https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-... (post by Limor's husband Phillip Torrone):
> 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_
Does anyone have an example of one of these "hate sites" that Sparkfun employees allegedly created? That sounds curious. And possibly politically loaded, since the word "hate" has been weaponised to mean all sorts of things, like for example, any positive mention of Donald Trump.
On a maybe-related note, I see Adafruit is a heavily identitarian company built around a strident "girl boss" with the purple hair and piercing. I'm getting a whiff of far-left activism.
https://www.adafruit.com/about
> Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT engineer, Limor "Ladyada" Fried ... Adafruit has expanded offerings to include tools, equipment, and electronics that Limor personally selects, tests, and approves before going in to the Adafruit store. Adafruit is a 100% woman owned manufacturing company, a certified Minority and Woman-owned Business Enterprise (M/WBE), a certified Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE), and WOSB ... Limor was named a White House Champion of Change in 2016
> I'm getting a whiff of far-left activism.
I think you're getting a whiff of yourself.
why talk about limor's appearance?
As a pretext for harassing her, it appears.
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.
> I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here.
You don't actually know that for a fact.
> 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?
Hmm, but the accusations are so vague that it's going to be even more speculation, don't you think?
Yes, and that speculation is going to be entirely around "what did adafruit do" and not "what did sparkfun do".
There is no such thing as bad publicity...
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
Right, then why are you publicizing / dramatizing your own disgust?
tu quo que
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.
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.
Ok, ok, I exaggerated. But still, communuty is small, and the industry is big, and drama seems to be handled very differently in both
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.
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.
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!
The list is supposed to be read as "offensive jokes", not any joke at all.
Commas are akin to thing(1|2|3) sometimes.
So it's offensive comments, offensive insults, offensive jokes, etc, as I read it, with ; breaking the association.
You're absolutely correct and it's me who has mis-read that part. The point of the oddly relaxed wording on sexual images and behaviour still stands though!
It's so the wrong opinion can be selectively enforced against.
> sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic
Well if someone was working on something like a medical device there might be some documentation that could be interpreted as sexual but that documenting it was not gratuitous.
Just guessing it's to cover pictures of electronic projects involving body parts that are normally covered and/or risque attire?
We live in an age of sex perverts who want their perversity affirmed.