Hello, I recently bought an arduino that was made in China, i thought it was a copy, but the retailer said it is authorized by arduino.cc to be made and distributed to China as a genuine product of arduino.cc. The board is made with very good quality, it has serial number and an holographic stamp on the box. I have already seen the genuine arduino, and in fact, it is identical to the one made in Italy, the only difference is that it was made in china and the info on the board is writen in chinese, and it has a reference to the website: arduino.org.cn.
On Arduino IDE Menu Tools -> Get Board Info it shows:
If it’s a fake, it’s a damned convincing one. They even have the special PTC fuse. I suspect it’s legitimate.
It lists an Arduino.org.cn name - making me think that the deal/packaging dates to when arduino.org and arduino.cc were separated and litigating. I’m not sure what the status of that thing is now.
DrAzzy:
If it's a fake, it's a damned convincing one. They even have the special PTC fuse. I suspect it's legitimate.
It lists an Arduino.org.cn name - making me think that the deal/packaging dates to when arduino.org and arduino.cc were separated and litigating. I'm not sure what the status of that thing is now.
There was an official announcement in 2015 that arduino.cc was partnering with Seeed Studio for manufacturing and distribution in China and other Asian markets:
The idea was that Arduino would have specific manufacturers for each geographic area, just as they had Adafruit doing manufacturing in the US. I don't think the intent was for the locally manufactured boards to be distributed outside their geographic territory, so you would get a Seeed Studio manufactured board if you bought an Arduino in China but an Adafruit manufactured board if you bought one in the US. I'm not sure what has happened since then. The manufacturing plan could have changed since the .cc/.org dispute was resolved.
Of course arduino.cc would likely not have arduino.org.cn on their boards (though I think they do own that domain now) but it could have been a similar agreement made between arduino.org and a Chinese manufacturer.