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.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the big players that I know ship and sell globally like Digikey, Newark and Arrow are all Adafruit distributors, and presumably that wouldn't change. Do you mean brick and mortar or something else?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Hi phil, appreciate the supposed candor here. I'm just an uninvolved HN observer interested in piecing together all the details of this dispute, here are some follow-up questions:
- The first public claim is that you engaged in targeted social-media harassment of an individual ('discatte') [1], linking various personally-identifiable information to their public profile without consent (name, email and gmail profile pic), and further intentionally misgendering/dead-naming them after being made aware that this was harmful. Do you have any sort of public response to these claims, denying or apologizing for this behavior?
- The second public claim is that the email report you sent to Sparkfun [2] was not simply a 'report' of harassing actions, but itself crossed the line into further harassing behavior ('hi jerks', 'you monsters', etc). Did you really, as claimed, copy the former employee's fiancee's current employer in these email threads as well? Any other context on why this unrelated employer needed to be brought into your dispute?
- Not only SparkFun, but it appears you were also banned from Fossoton [3] for CoC violations related to the dispute with discatte, correct? Any other context on this ban?
- It appears that you also sent another user harassing messages to their Etsy account [4] after objecting to your 'doxxing' of discatte's personal information and blocking you elsewhere, and they reported to you Etsy's trust and safety team. Any other context on this separate incident of alleged harassment?
> We are now working on an open-source, Teensy-compatible board.
Yeah, right; the PCB art work looks in rather an advanced state of completion that has been in the works for a while due to the proverbial writing being on the wall.
More like, we have now given a brighter green light to our ongoing in-house project to eliminate the supply risk coming from Sparkfun, now that the shit has hit the fan ...
@ptorrone, the forum drama is hard to follow, and maybe a little upset or sleep-deprived.
The blog post is OK (though maybe consider dropping the "We were informed...", and the addendum about "trying to drag"), but doesn't explain the forum drama about context.
In a skim of the forum, I saw only insufficient references to a context of problems and maybe improper behavior, scattered around. I couldn't get a good read on the context, after trying for longer than I think most people will.
If the company would like to explain more about the context, would it make sense to take a deep breath, and sit down with a PR advisor or lawyer, to figure out exactly what you want to say, and how? Do it very carefully, so you only have to do it once?
Or would the company like to drop the matter of that context, and move on, even though that would leave the confusing forum messages?
(Disclosure: Limor is a friend from our earlier hacker/MIT days, but I've not discussed this matter with her.)
It's funny because he tried to excuse it in another comment by saying he's using speech-to-text. I really don't understand what this lie was supposed to accomplish since he seems to be the only person using a STT system incapable of proper capitalisation.
Hi Phil, sorry to hear that something went down and involved Limor... that's not cool. A few Q's:
1. Will the freenzy be a 100% drop-in replacement for the teensy?
2. Will the freenzy be able to be programmed using teensyduino?
3. PJRC's bootloader is closed-source (I know, I've built 1000 Teensy-LC's after the product's discontinuation). Does that mean you're sourcing bootloaders from PJRC or reverse engineering the bootloader chip?
Opinion 1: If I can't take code written for a Teensy and upload it straight to the Freenzy, then this is not "Teensy Compatible". Likewise if the pinout is not the same, including all of the rear pcb-pads.
Opinion 2: If this is not actually Teensy Compatible, but just "Teensy Inspired", what about branding this as adafruit's own microcontroller and not cut into Paul and Robin's income by selling a totally different product that rides on their name recognition and decade of work?
Teensy's closed bootloader, USB stack, hardware design are what is proprietary. But the toolchain is open. Eg: I can use PlatformIO, etc.
From my perspective an open alternative would splinter the community rather than replace it. Developers value Teensy's polish & consistency (PAnd this is Paul Stoffregen's discipline).
If you endeavor to follow this path, you'd see adoption from transparency advocates and research/security-focused devs, but pragmatists like myself would stick with what works and what's affordable.
Your real problem is replicating that engineering rigor in an open-source project, is a lot harder than it looks. Let me give an example; STM32 is more open but shows us exactly what fragmentation looks like without unified vision.
a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business, "This message is to formally confirm that SparkFun Electronics intends to issue applicable royalty payment for Q4 2025 no later than January 31, 2026, in accordance with previously established timelines."
i get it, they want to keep selling those products. this was probably about money and margins.
> a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business,
The linked website indicates this decision was made on or around Jan 7. Your own liked page is dated for the 12. Unless you’re asserting that the decision was made and effective before Q4 2025, this sounds like them putting in writing that they intend to follow through on preexisting contractual obligations for prior sales. Not really “doing business with while not doing business” IMO.
Hmm... reads a bit like an email a forum moderator might send a disobedient user. This seems strange, verging on unprofessional, for corporate communications.
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:
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.”
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.
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.
For additional context to the context, here's Nick's account of the so-called 'long running harassment campaign' [1]: Nick made a joke site about Phil back in 2017, Phil emailed asking him to stop, Nick immediately transferred the domain to him with a heartfelt apology ("man... I just wanna be friends. I wanna support
you and Limor and also feel good about the place that I work (and kinda
live). [...] These social tools don't always translate, for that I apologize."), and they wrapped up the exchange on good terms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
95 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadHowever, 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.
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 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.
> 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.
My guess is someone was trying to hit on someone and got mad when they were rejected.
The fact that they mention a "private matter" makes me think this is some petty personal grievance that has somehow escalated to this.
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!
- The first public claim is that you engaged in targeted social-media harassment of an individual ('discatte') [1], linking various personally-identifiable information to their public profile without consent (name, email and gmail profile pic), and further intentionally misgendering/dead-naming them after being made aware that this was harmful. Do you have any sort of public response to these claims, denying or apologizing for this behavior?
- The second public claim is that the email report you sent to Sparkfun [2] was not simply a 'report' of harassing actions, but itself crossed the line into further harassing behavior ('hi jerks', 'you monsters', etc). Did you really, as claimed, copy the former employee's fiancee's current employer in these email threads as well? Any other context on why this unrelated employer needed to be brought into your dispute?
- Not only SparkFun, but it appears you were also banned from Fossoton [3] for CoC violations related to the dispute with discatte, correct? Any other context on this ban?
- It appears that you also sent another user harassing messages to their Etsy account [4] after objecting to your 'doxxing' of discatte's personal information and blocking you elsewhere, and they reported to you Etsy's trust and safety team. Any other context on this separate incident of alleged harassment?
[1] https://digipres.club/@discatte/115600253924804026
[2] https://gist.github.com/NPoole/df0ec196ac1db7e6eecfd2496b9b4...
[3] https://gist.github.com/NPoole/8e128edb6e32986755450da9285b5...
[4] https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115599931317645220
Yeah, right; the PCB art work looks in rather an advanced state of completion that has been in the works for a while due to the proverbial writing being on the wall.
More like, we have now given a brighter green light to our ongoing in-house project to eliminate the supply risk coming from Sparkfun, now that the shit has hit the fan ...
The blog post is OK (though maybe consider dropping the "We were informed...", and the addendum about "trying to drag"), but doesn't explain the forum drama about context.
In a skim of the forum, I saw only insufficient references to a context of problems and maybe improper behavior, scattered around. I couldn't get a good read on the context, after trying for longer than I think most people will.
If the company would like to explain more about the context, would it make sense to take a deep breath, and sit down with a PR advisor or lawyer, to figure out exactly what you want to say, and how? Do it very carefully, so you only have to do it once?
Or would the company like to drop the matter of that context, and move on, even though that would leave the confusing forum messages?
(Disclosure: Limor is a friend from our earlier hacker/MIT days, but I've not discussed this matter with her.)
Seems plain that the PR Release was crafted with intent
1. Will the freenzy be a 100% drop-in replacement for the teensy?
2. Will the freenzy be able to be programmed using teensyduino?
3. PJRC's bootloader is closed-source (I know, I've built 1000 Teensy-LC's after the product's discontinuation). Does that mean you're sourcing bootloaders from PJRC or reverse engineering the bootloader chip?
Opinion 1: If I can't take code written for a Teensy and upload it straight to the Freenzy, then this is not "Teensy Compatible". Likewise if the pinout is not the same, including all of the rear pcb-pads.
Opinion 2: If this is not actually Teensy Compatible, but just "Teensy Inspired", what about branding this as adafruit's own microcontroller and not cut into Paul and Robin's income by selling a totally different product that rides on their name recognition and decade of work?
you have scraped sparkfun.com plenty. I know, I've seen the server logs.
regardless, there is no longer private drama.
i get it, they want to keep selling those products. this was probably about money and margins.
The linked website indicates this decision was made on or around Jan 7. Your own liked page is dated for the 12. Unless you’re asserting that the decision was made and effective before Q4 2025, this sounds like them putting in writing that they intend to follow through on preexisting contractual obligations for prior sales. Not really “doing business with while not doing business” IMO.
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/sparkfun-to-manufac...
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.”
We're only probably seeing part of the whole mess though.
[1] https://chaos.social/@North/115602441875664452
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!
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.
https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/open-source-teensy-...
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.