If you find a Nano with an FTDI chip for $2, it's likely a clone FTDI chip.?
FTDI is fed up with supporting clones of their chips, have taken defensive measures.
As I recall, some of their drivers disable a clone chip that claims to be an FTDI.?
The genuine FTDI chips work very well, and are what's used on the original Arduino Nano.
This in a nutshell.
While macOS may have issues with CH340 chips, Windows users tend to have issues with both FTDI
and Prolific chips (in both cases, the market was flooded with cheap, cheerful and counterfeit PL2302s and FT232RLs and as a result Prolific and FTDI started locking out chips; even a lot of legit vendors were getting burned by this (most of the programming cables even offered by OEMs for Wouxun and Baofeng hand-helds turned out to be using counterfeit or at least blacklisted PL2032s, and Sparkfun actually got burned on a batch of FTDI chips that turned out to be counterfeit or at least blacklisted).? Apparently there are STILL issues to this day on Win7 and Win10 with the Prolific chips in particular...
Probably the only chipsets that are a) legitimately inexpensive and b) work pretty much gracefully across all platforms seem to be the SiLabs CP2102 (which is honestly what I tend to use anymore with anything requiring a USB-to-serial connection--no issues with blacklisting, works pretty much out-of-the-box across OS's).? If the Raduino does end up redesigned, I'd humbly suggest using CP2102s :D
-KI4QGJ
