Hi,
I had a nano-clone that I bought for maybe €5 or so on ebay that had 2 disadvantages for me:
First you had to solder the pins on and then it had mini-usb.
I now found that you can buy nanos on aliexpress (€3.22) with the pins already soldered in and usb-c - however a few people report problems with the devices.
My question now: Would you buy such clones on ali or is that just asking for troubles?
Did anybody ever try?
My experience:
I have clones with mini USB that needed pins soldered, without a problem in five years.
I don't see either of those as a problem, in fact I have several Nano clones of that type
I just got a bunch of NANO clones (old bootloader) Yes the pins have to be soldered, a 2 minute job, and who cares what USB style it is, most guys have a handful of every kind.
I agree, and not related.
Just for note, there are lot of problems with Esp32 boards with usb-c connector. I don't have one on hands, but according to others somehow they f..ked up that connection.
Never had problems with nano clones.
Owch, I got a few of the new S3 esp32's a while back, and they are all USB-C. I have done some basic testing of a few with no issues, but now I will be wary.
Why not buy Arduino products (and help pay for this place)?
I can get 10 clones for the price of one genuine. Trust me, they will not miss my money, whereas I do notice the difference. I do buy one of each kind I am interested in and almost every new board they announce except for the bigger boards, I am more of a NANO guy.
My experiences with buying things on AliExpress have been absolutely horrible. I have made thousands of purchases on eBay of the exact same type of product from the exact same type of random Chinese sellers who ship from China. Of course, you have to expect that you are taking a complete gamble in terms of product quality when you make this sort of purchase, but I always received the eBay purchases in a reasonable time and in the rare cases where there were problems the sellers were very good about resolving it.
Then I was seduced by the sometimes lower prices I found on AliExpress and started making many of my purchases there. The difference in customer experience was astonishing. Sometimes the shipment would take three months to arrive. Far too often it never arrived at all. And when this happened, the sellers didn't ever do anything so I just had to take the loss.
The way the AliExpress platform is set up favors the seller in any such dispute, whereas on eBay it is the opposite. This also gave me the depressing revelation that, in a general sense (obviously there will always be individual exceptions), the good experiences I was having from this type of seller on eBay was not because they were conscientious people, but that they were forced to treat the customer well by eBay's policies, and when the same type of seller was given the opportunity by the lack of such policies on Aliexpress to increase their profits by treating the customer poorly, that is exactly what they did.
The fact that it took so long to receive items, if I even received them at all was also very harmful because it meant that any projects I was buying the items for were completely derailed.
So my advice is to avoid using AliExpress unless it is a situation where you either know the specific seller is responsible, or you simply can't get the item anywhere else. Other than that, it is well worth paying a little more to actually get the thing you need to progress with your Arduino journey.
After eliminating AliExpress, you still have a spectrum of choices between the sketchily cheap Chinese sellers on eBay, the same cheap Chinese products redistributed by domestic sellers including fulfillment by Amazon (meaning the shipping is fast and reliable, but the product quality is still a roll of the dice), and products from trusted manufacturers distributed via trusted channels (e.g., Arduino, Adafruit, SparkFun, Seeed Studio, Digikey, Mouser, Arrow).
For a beginner, I think messing with the sketchy Chinese stuff is a bad idea. The reason is that you are already facing so many unavoidable challenges. The last thing you need is to add unreliable hardware on top of that. The harm dealing with bad hardware can do to your progress far far far outweigh the money you save by buying sketchy hardware instead of high quality stuff. However, if the sketchy Chinese stuff is truly all you can afford, then it is better than nothing and in many cases it will indeed work perfectly well.
For a professional, I also think it doesn't make sense to mess with the sketchy Chinese stuff. Even though we are more capable of dealing with bad hardware, it is still a waste of time and a professional's time is valuable enough that even the small amount of time wasted on bad hardware is going to be worth far more than the savings from buying it instead of reliable stuff.
Maybe there is some place in the middle where it makes sense to mess with the sketchy Chinese stuff. An experienced hobbyist can deal with bad hardware and some might be in a situation where they have only a very limited budget to dedicate to their hobby, while not really assigning a dollar value to the time spent on the hobby. I took this perspective at some points during my hobbyist phase of working with Arduino, but I'm a bit of a cheapskate so I might have just been deluding myself.
I have purchased a large variety over the years and they work. Be sure to read the description carefully so you get what you want. I always get them without the pins soldered on, I color code the pins and when plugging into another color coded it saves mistooks. Lately they have been coming with the new bootloader.
That is quite different from my experience. It used to take much longer for shipping from Ali, but now eBay and Ali are similar (I am in Canada). With Ali I have had a couple of lost items, the money was quickly refunded. In one case the lost item showed up and I was told just to keep it (as well as keeping the refund) For small items they do not want you to ship it back, the Canadian outbound postage would exceed the cost of most small items. With eBay, coming across the border is a nightmare and shipping back (if offered, not always true) would be very expensive and eBay doesn't pay for it. BTW, half the stuff on eBay and Amazon are now from Ali but much more expensive in order to pay the fast expensive shipping. My general practice is to order one from Amazon and as many as 10 from Ali.
Can you provide proof of this?
AliExpress, Amazon, and eBay are each online marketplaces. They provide a platform on which individual sellers list the items they have to sell.
It is true that Amazon itself is one of the sellers on the Amazon marketplace, but that is not the case with AliExpress. AliExpress only provides the platform and have absolutely nothing to do with the actual products that are sold on their platform. So saying that AliExpress is selling things on eBay and Amazon just doesn't make any sense.
It is true that an individual seller may list their products on multiple marketplaces. For example, I used to manufacture craft products and I sold my products on the Amazon, eBay, and Etsy marketplaces (in order to ensure a customer would find them no matter which marketplace they preferred to shop on). But that is completely different from claiming that the AliExpress company sells on eBay and Amazon.
This is also contrary to my experience with Aliexpress. I order lots of stuff to Switzerland. I've never had a packet go missing. I've had some fake chips and some non-working modules for which I got a refund without problems. Some stuff I've just had to throw away. I choose retailers who use the Aliexpress shipping service (it's currently called "choice") which promises 9 to 11 days shipping. I don't buy high value items because I don't want to get involved with possible returning of items for a refund. In principle I'm quite happy to accept some risks for amazingly low prices. I also like having a large stock of items on hand for projects so, for example, instead of buying a couple of trimmer potentiometers for a specific project from a specialist retailer, I'd prefer to buy a box with 10 each of 10 values ( or maybe 2 boxes, one of horizontal and one of the vertical variants) which, from a specialist retailer would be too expensive. With Aliexpress prices I can do that. The only problem I have now is place to store it all.
I can only share my own experiences. I wonder how many orders you others who like Aliexpress have placed. My experiences are based on thousands of eBay orders and over 200 AliExpress orders, spread out over many different sellers and over five years, so my observations are based on a very good sample size rather than on pure chance as would be the case if I only made a few orders on each marketplace and happened to have bad luck on a single order.
I've had good luck with Aliexpress. But I did take some care to find vendors who seemed to have a tech focus, and weren't also selling clothing and sex toys.
The Chinese have done a really good job of "cost reduction engineering." The last Nano clones I bought fit all the components on one side of the PCB, which I think is pretty amazing.
But then, I have some significant faith in my own abilities to check things out.
During the great "supply chain problems" caused by the plague, I think some less reputable dealers started to sell boards with "clone" Atmega328 chips (or other only "vaguely compatible" chips, that take more expertise to set up.) (and apparently some non-genuine CH340 USB chips as well, with problems?) That's unfortunate.
OTOH, there are some Chinese vendors that now have "official stores" on aliexpress, which is how you get those $0.12 CH32V003 RISC-V chips... I trust those to send me what they claim, but supporting its actual USE may be more of a problem. (Some vendors, notably WCH and Espressif, seem to have taken notice of how "useful" the Western hobby market is, and are providing levels of support (documentation, SDKs, forums, Wikis. etc) that would have been unheard of several years ago. (Better that Renesas. Grr.)) That's really neat!
I'm sure Aliexpress have plenty of low cost storage solutions...
I don't know, I have never bought from Ali or eBay. I buy from a small local seller for the simple reason that I have peace of mind; replacement within two days from calling them if something arrives DOA.
I've found a good range of suitable storage on Ali by searching for "bead storage". I now have a collection of storage boxes with enough compartments for a lifetime supply of SMD resistors, capacitors, IC sockets and just about every combination of 2.54mm pin headers and sockets!
Quantitatively, our track record is comparable, although I easily surpass the 200 order mark. My purchases are virtually all electronics - individual components, equipment and modules/assemblies. Only a handful (literally; we're talking about 4-5 transactions over hundreds of orders in 5+ years) ended up being problematic due to items taking longer than promised to arrive, item performance not matching description or item not having shipped out in the first place. I received a refund in all instances.
The claim resolution process I've also always found remarkably transparent; there's equal opportunities for the seller and the buyer to provide arguments and evidence for their case. Then generally an AliExpress representative steps in and passes judgement. This judgement is in my experience biased in favor of the buyer, but the few claims I've filed were all well-supported; I had a good case in all instances and that was recognized and dealt with swiftly by AliE.
What both eBay and AliExpress have in common is a relatively poorly functioning search function. On eBay, it results in the handful of relevant items being impossible to find. On AliExpress, it results in 1000s of similar items popping up in a search while you're looking for something fairly specific. Neither is very effective and this makes shopping on both eBay and AliExpress somewhat time-consuming, which makes neither platform very relevant for a professional context where time equals money. For amateur/hobbyist purposes, the time spent on finding the right stuff can be tolerable depending on how much patience you have.
Overall I'm quite happy with AliE. Similar experience I had in the past with platforms like DHGate and MiniInTheBox, but I'm not sure to what extent they still exist. This was before AliExpress made its claim to fame and it has all but pushed the others off the map. A case of network externalities and very much like Google dominating the search engine market and Microsoft the desktop software market. It's the way the cookie crumbles...
On the topic of Nano clones: I've bought several over the years. They all work fine. But as in all instances of online shopping, read the item description carefully before making a purchase. The "Nano" comes in many flavors and Chinese copycats have found myriad ways of reducing cost - sometimes with functional consequences. @westfw mentioned clone controllers (esp. LGT8F328P), but I've also seen (and in fact, bought) Nano's with ATMega168 instead of '328. These products generally work perfectly fine for what they are, but may (will) not have identical performance or specifications to the genuine Arduino Nano. If you are aware of the limitations, this need not be a problem at all. Mind you, this is only the clones that are functionally inferior in some way; there are also plenty of Nano clones out there that offer everything the genuine Nano does.
Oh man, and Amazon is not any better. For years I have been wondering if they really have some gain in sales from filling the results with not corresponding items. Maybe it works with average buyer? And I'm just an exception who really wants to find product X when searching X.
I'm quite sure that at least Amazon and Alibaba have technical resources to provide accurate search results 