ESP8266 Community Forum

It always surprizes me that they can produce this kind of modules for this price..

You prolly ran into a batch of rebadged/reused/counterfeit chips. Unforunately it is common practise in china and even the big 'players' like seeed, sparkfun and adafruit run into this, Still the saying 'if it is too good to be true, it prolly is' stands up. However I still love the wonders of china

I think the main reason for the amazing cheapness is the 'Gongkai' phenomena - as described by one of my heroes, Bunnie.

See here for a description: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107

Sjaak wrote:It always surprizes me that they can produce this kind of modules for this price..

You prolly ran into a batch of rebadged/reused/counterfeit chips. Unforunately it is common practise in china and even the big 'players' like seeed, sparkfun and adafruit run into this, Still the saying 'if it is too good to be true, it prolly is' stands up. However I still love the wonders of china

I guess that is the case. These could be refurnished or remarked chips especially when they are under a metal can nobody would notice it.
I should tear down some Espressif "WROOM" modules see what flash chip they are using on their own module.

If the chip is just required to be a quad-spi flash chip then perhaps getting chips from big-league distributors like mouser, digikey, farnell etc would be a good assurance of quality (at least as good as those without professional procurement business contacts can get). Or if the hobby suppliers like adafruit and sparkfun carry these chips, they also have much better ability to verify procurement than me!

I don't really need 100,000 cycles at all, but I do need to be assured that the flash will survive a few thousand cycles at the very least!