ATTENTION PLEASE! There are lots of rampant  shops selling counterfeit of Arduino board, customers should pay close attention to th e board when purchasing. Here ia a personal experience a guy had. Hope it works.

The following is about a guy’s  personally experience and lesson he learned from his bad adventure.

 

I ordered 5 Arduino UNO boards, in order to use it with a 3Dpad shield. I made this acquisition on a well known shop on the web.

But once I tried to use it with the 3Dpad, it didn’t work correctly: the signal was absolutly instable. When trying to understand the problem, I saw that the system works well when the USB was unplugged, but not when it was plugged.

From that point I tried to find informations on the web, also I compared with attention this UNO board with the previous used succesfully.

And then I had the bad surprise to understand that this “Arduino” UNO board was a fake!

In more, this counterfeit is not well done and they made mistakes when copying the original.

One can see small mistakes made on the copy in the picture below:

After signaling the problem to the provider’s website, I decided to see if a work around was possible, in order to make it work with3Dpad. I made few experiments, and with the help of chance [I didnt have the fake’s schematics in hand…], I discovered thatcutting a wire enables the 3Dpad to work. 

The small modification is shown in the image below: 

Unfortunatly, I do not have a complete explaination, but I know that this trace is in relation with the USB grounding…

With this modification, your “fake” UNO USB will be recognized by the PC only when the power comes from an external supply, that fits well with 3Dpad (12V DC).

GEEETECH is an offfical distrubuter of Aduino in china, custoers can rest assured.all our Arduino boards are imported with original packaging from Arduino in Italy.you can check the links here.

 

Hope this will help.