Our products are being copied now. How cool is that? :)
Yes, its happening. And China is not to blame this time.
About a year ago I have been contacted by Paco Millán, a person with longest and most impressive email title I have ever seen in a world of mostly unformal Amiga community:
Community Manager and manager of external communication at AMIGAstore.eu ( http://www.amigastore.eu ).
Wow indeed.
What was it about? Apparently, at that time Amigastore.eu folks have been unable to come up with viable replacement power supply for small box Amigas by themselves, so they expressed an interest to buy bulk quantity of our AMIPSU lineup and resell them under their trademark, through their web-shop. Because (from number of various reasons) it really made no sense to me, I politely turned down their offer. And I thought its the end of it. Untill today, actually.
I have recently been asked by one of my customers, if I could make a custom version of our A1200 chassis LED module with white LEDs, instead of usual orange-yellow-green combo.
Sure, no problem, this is what we do. The customer response was puzzling, however: could you maybe even sell white LED bars alone, I plan to put them on amigastore.eu version instead, they have the module made of matching black PCB, yet they only make them with orange-yellow-green LEDs combo.
It honestly made zero sense to me, until I browsed their web-shop and found this
https://amigastore.eu/en/705-amiga-1200-led-board.html
, an almost perfect replica of our product. With the exception of sloppy made cable and different PCB color, they have copied whole thing to the point. The idea of laser cut plexiglass lightpipes backlit by SMD LEDs, the way lightpipes are coupled with PCB, precisely the same component placement, module versions split by the chassis revision, its all there.
And while it is somewhat sad to realize people behind amigastore.eu are unable to come out with their own original products and they have to steal from someone else in order to compensate for their incompetence, its on the other hand quite amusing and especially flattering, that among dozens of available LED module designs to copy from, they have chosen the best one – the one of ours. So yeah, how cool is that? 🙂
Thank you, amigastore.eu
P.S.: Our LED boards have evolved, so there is something else you might wanna take a look again soon 😉