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points by dyauspitr 1 day ago | 0 comments

Pretty much any new product gets a Chinese copy within a year. How are you so confident JLC is not the source of atleast some of these. Also there is no other alternative so they have that security.

[–] kevin42 1 day ago

That's fair. But gerber files are just a step up from reverse engineering a physical PCB. For a fairly simple, 2 layer PCB, the actual hardware will be easier to reverse engineer than gerbers alone.

So even if nobody ever sees my schematic or gerber files, they could still clone a lot of products if they just have someone spend some time with a multimeter on a device they buy.

[–] dyauspitr 1 day ago

Yeah, or at this point just get an LLM to verify it and explain the circuit.

[–] delfinom 17 hours ago

Chinese engineering labor is dirt cheap. They don't need your design files to make a clone.

And contrary to popular white-washed belief, there is very little to anything special in most copied designs.