Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
Self-Certification of consumer electronics
Gyro:
--- Quote from: Someone on April 16, 2020, 10:38:47 pm ---
--- Quote from: splin on April 16, 2020, 06:59:00 pm ---I believe that there is a *lot* of stuff sold which hasn't been expensively tested by an RF test company, by small companies - but obviously not many want to talk about it. How can $25 products, such as test gear sold to hobbyists, which might only sell in the few hundreds at most, cover $10K+ EMI testing cost and still make a profit?
There must be quite a few posters here who sell there own designs. It would be interesting to have an anonymous poll to see how many do and how many would admit to selling non certified product or product which hasn't been third party emissions tested. After all the chances that a small voltage reference module for calibrating DMMs or an Arduino temperature sensor shield would cause real world problems must be vanishingly small although theoretically possible if marginally stable and oscillate in some conditions. Is Dave's uCurrent CE certified for example?
--- End quote ---
This space has exemptions in FCC part 15 subpart B (see attachment below) so its possible to avoid some of the more onerous compliance standards.
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Yes, hobbyist stuff and prototype boards fly below the radar in the EU too, that's how Sparkfun and the like get away with it. Unfortunately the OP indicated Consumer in this case. Which ups the approval stakes.
As I mentioned previously, find a friendly local test house. They will know all the specific standard that apply [EDIT: and have them!], and if the item is simple, has a small number of interconnect configurations and operating modes (those take up time). You may be surprised at how little it actually costs you to do it properly. Accompanied testing allows you to sit with the test engineer, perform quick investigations and fixes and hopefully a first time pass (as long as you implement the mods - they will take product photos).
One company we used was out in the countryside, had a nice open field emissions setup, and all the chambers located in a converted pig farm. At one point, due to high demand, they were operating 24hr 3 shifts. If you took one of the cheaper night slots, they even threw in free pizza. I remember one time there was a load of different sex toys waiting to be tested for the importer. Happy memories.
Wilksey:
You can worry about certification until the cows come home,
I know a company who have been operating for 30+ years, and apart from the equipment it builds for the Uk government nothing else is certified, the components inside are already certified and all radio equipment is using a manufacturer approved antenna, therefore the assumption is that the RF is not being abused so it should still comply with the original cert criteria, much like AdaFruit, the only difference apart from the radiated emissions and immunity EMC testing is a product file, which has datasheets, information about decommissioning, WEEE information, product and component information to support the claim etc.
A lot of local councils buy the products and most of the products are "self certified", and not once has it ever been questioned or challenged.
So i'm not saying what is right or wrong for you to do, and this is industrial electronics not consumer, but, if you were to self certify I very much doubt anyone would ever know or even care as long as you don't do anything knowingly that could take it outside of the operating characteristics. There are people who think changing a resistor it will need to go back through all compliance testing then there are some that will change the antenna path and not worry about testing and rely on the OEM testing.
You would be surprised how many just don't put the declarations on or just stick them on and hope for the best, ultimately it comes down to cost, it's not cheap to do compliance testing, so if you are only selling something for a few £'s then it might not be viable.
fcb:
--- Quote from: OwO on April 17, 2020, 05:46:09 am ---These are the things that most designers completely overlook and can lead to safety liability real fast. I highly recommend building several transmitters for e.g. 10MHz, 100MHz, 915MHz, 2450MHz, of at least 5W each, for susceptibility testing.
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NO! Don't build transmitters, 5W or otherwise - this is a shite way to look for susceptability and super illegal! Susceptability testing should ALWAYS take place in a chamber, and you need something like a swept 20W source (power is misnomer, it's really field strength that matters).
If you are just starting out, then probably find a competitior product(s) and see what they are claiming compliance to. If you need EN standards - buy them for a small fraction of the price from www.evs.ee (the Estonian standards agency)!!
If you are buying a COTS PSU - make sure it has all the CoC/CE stuff. In most cases that's the big risky EMC bit.
You can do a huge amount with a basic spec-an and some DIY field probes. If you can post schematics/layouts on-line then this forum will give you a huge amount of help/advice re: passing emc and other gotcha's.
Also,you might be surprised by the number of products outhere don't have TCF's and testing to back up their CE status. This might be a function of the virtually zero enforcement that goes on................................................................................
If you are in the UK - drop me a PM/email, we have an EMC chamber and the toys sat idle 98% of the time and happy to throw stuff in it for genuine scrappy boot-strapping start-ups for a small charity donation.
EDIT: Sorry Wilksey - just read your post - not trying to parrot your line on 'surprised by' :)
Wilksey:
No worries, just goes to show it does happen more often than some think.
Speaking of PSUs, I had "dealings" with Traco - usually a good brand not cheap, not overly expensive, all the right stickers in the right places etc etc.
One of the products we did take for testing was transmitting more noise than the analyser could read at it's settings, we had literally just the PSU at one point and tried different load resistors to make sure it wasn't a loading thing, in the end we switched out to XP Power, we had brief exchanges of conversations with Traco and they asked for the test results which we sent them, in the end they just started ignoring us, so we sent 400 PSU's back to the supplier after speaking to them and them not getting anywhere with Traco (we sent them all of our original correspondence) and they gave us XP's for the same price, they were on paper £15 more each than the Traco for the same specs, they looked quite similar too, but they were very quiet! Been running them ever since and switched all of our products away from Traco.
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