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Saturday, December 15, 2018

SunFounder Raspad defective worthless garbage and no support for defective units

I normally like to keep my blog positive but I have to give some information on the Raspad that is completely negative.

I was one of the first run of crowd founders for the Raspad by SunFounder. I never was able to get it to work, contacted support several times and got no help. Since it took over 6 months to get to me and for me to test it, my credit card company can not reverse the charge.

As soon as iI tried it, it was clear that the touch screen was fucked up. I found a suggestion to update the touchscreen driver which i did and it did not help. The problem is that the upper 3/4" of the display does not respond to touch. Support told me to update the driver after I informed then that i did this and it did not help.

I have since reinstalled raspian, calibrated the touch screen and tried everything else i can think of. I have come to the conclusion that the touch screen unit itself is defective.

I asked SunFounder if they could fix or replace it and got no response after 5 e-mails to support. They basically do not give a shit.

Sunfounder Raspad is a piece of garbage which is clear after disassembling it. They use the cheapest components and assemble them in a horribly engineered case. Good luck trying to fix it.

I decided to sell it as is on E-Bay but after trying to calibrate it decided to cancel the listing because i could not guarantee anything about this p[piece of junk and if SunFounder will not respond to my demand for fixing it, they will not for the new owner.

So, I took it apart and could not find anything like a loose connector. My guess is that one of the lines to the touch capacitive grid is not connected, in other words that the touch screen itself is defective. The display and touch screen are bonded together and there is no chance of fixing either the display or the touch screen if defective.

SunFounder has terrible quality control as evidenced what i found on disassembly. They are probably aware that a large percentage of units do not work (i have found others complaining of similar and many other problems) and just do not give a shit.

Interesting that after crowd funding on Indigogo and meeting their goal and supposedly shipping units to their funders, they are now listing the exact same thing again as if it was something new. This is completely against Indigogo's policies but they will not investigate other than sending me some bullshit boilerplate and telling me that i can sue Sunfounder.

Sunfounder is also selling the same device on kickstarter funding site. How many times do they need to collect money from funders for the same piece of shit. They have discovered that they can get money in advance and not deal with non working units. They probably have a pile of non functional units and want to sell them to unsuspecting crowd funders.

Sunfounder is criminal. Do not buy anything from them unless you are willing to throw it our if it does not work. I wasted too much time trying to get this POS to work and wish I had thrown it out immediately.

So for being a nice guy and sending SunFounder $200 and waiting over six months to get the POS and try to get it to work, all i have to show for it is a Raspberry Pi model 3B and a bluetooth keyboard of marginal quality.