Hello everyone. I’m Mike, one half of Tactrix. I wanted to comment on this thread and make myself available for questions if anyone has any. Sorry for the lengthy first post but here goes....
“Other thing it's from China, so might be a Tactrix knock off.”
We have one in hand and it’s absolutely a Chinese clone complete with a random assortment of hand soldered parts to reduce cost where the counterfeiters guess it won’t matter, and with chip numbers hand ground off with a dremel tool so that other thieves can’t copy their copy.
“should I take one for the team and order one of these??”
Which team would that be? Would that be the Mitsubishi community? We like to think that our company is as much part of that team as each of us that make up this small company. We’ve offered a unique and affordable product for years which many people have used to tune their cars in an open non-proprietary way. Colby started working on this product when the only existing company making a Subaru tuning tool at the time wouldn’t sell to him because he wasn’t an approved tuner. Do you want to be on the team that can only access this type of technology through authorized tuners? Do you want to be part of a team that can’t share this type of tool amongst friends because the only tool available is one where each unit is locked to a VIN? If saving a few bucks by purchasing from those stealing from a small local company is helping your ‘team’ then, for the sake of all those here who benefit from the innovations of small scale American producers, I hope we can find some voices in this community who see it differently. I know I personally have a number of parts on my car, my motorcycle, and even non-automotive hobby components/tools that were made possible by small companies in this country taking a risk to bring something to their respective community. We’ve never tried to squeeze every last dollar out of our customers. We could easily link our product to one VIN but we don’t. If you want to buy an OpenPort 2.0 to share amongst a group of friends, you can totally do that without any issue. We want to support the home hobbyist and we hope that they’ll feel like they’re getting a fair deal by supporting our company in this effort.
“Wish I would have seen this before I ordered my Tactrix cable and paid $170.”
We thank you for your purchase. If you and many other of our customers hadn’t purchased our cable for $169 (price hasn’t increased a dollar since we first introduced it) there would be no EcuFlash. While we give away EcuFlash as one of many programs that work with our hardware, it’s the sale of that hardware that makes it possible for us to spend the time working on the reflashing software. If there was a cheap Chinese product to begin with, we would have never developed this ourselves.
“I have the feeling something went down with Tactrixs' supplier/builder in China and they decided to cut out the middle man and sell directly. “
While that definitely does happen in many cases with some companies, that's actually not what happened here. Our board builder is a small company in Washington state. Our company use to be located nearby, but we relocated to California because the owner’s wife was working on a project for the VA in SF. We still use that same board builder in Washington because we have a good relationship with them, and like us, they’re a pretty small company. Not as small as us, but still small enough
The final assembly, programming, testing, and shipping is all done in our California office. The circuit board in this clone is a copy, but not from the same template. If someone really cares about the details of how to tell, let me know when you have a unit in front of you and I can point out the differences. Copying a circuit board is pretty easy though and there isn’t anything you can really do about protecting it since it’s just a bunch of physical connections. Even if you have to grind through a few layers, those connections can mapped out pretty easily. The issue here is that in addition to the circuit board, they’re using stolen firmware, software, and our company name.
“My .02 is that if this is the case (I'm not saying it is), they got what they paid for. Companies that go outside the country for cheap labor and manufacturing to increase their bottom line deserve to have their sh|t stolen.”
I don’t know if I would go so far as to say deserve, but if you give someone else that much access, you should expect that it could happen.
“My wife ordered 4 phone cases from aliexpress and they came from China also...”
That’s a good item to order from China if you want a few designs and you don’t particularly care about the build quality. It’s important to understand what we’re talking about here isn’t just a close copy of a physical item based on a company being inspired by our design. This isn’t a knockoff iPhone cable that is functionally equivalent to the Apple product, and a good choice to replace your lost cable that came with your iPhone. This is stealing a circuit design, using our company name, stealing firmware, and providing copies of our software for use with this counterfeit hardware. The reason they’re able to sell this item so cheaply is that they’re not doing any of the work to create the hardware, firmware, or software. They’re still relying on your continued use of our software to reflash your Mitsubishi. Before you install our software, you are agreeing to our licensing terms, which we intentionally keep as brief as possible so as to be easily readable. These terms include:
“2. When used with a hardware interface, the software is to be used solely with OpenPort vehicle interfaces from Tactrix Inc. or other officially licensed interfaces. These sales fund the project development and keep the cost of such a tool reasonable.”
If saving $100 makes the difference between being able to complete your multi-thousand dollar project car, and ECU repair/replacement is something you feel comfortable dealing with, then you should probably roll the dice and go with the stolen goods. If you’re confident that the support you’ll receive from Guangdong is all you’ll ever need, then this may be the deal you’ve waited for. I can say for certain that not all users will be happy with the results as we’ve inspected this hardware and identified several issues with it.
To those who consider the value proposition and still decide to spend their hard earned dollars with us, we appreciate your support as we continue to develop new EcuFlash features and add compatibility for more vehicle models. As long as we can fund our company through the sale of the hardware we’ve designed, our EcuFlash software will remain free as will our support.
Thanks for reading,
-Mike