yeah, and looking at their board I see they use one of "ESP32-WROOM" modules, which has the wifi & blutooth & antennae (pre-certified by Espressif for FCC, CE so itself doesn't need testing) & flash & processor (which even has its own RC oscillator), which takes care of a whole ton of difficult stuff so all the designer needs to do is plop that module down and power it up and wire some SPI/I2C peripherals which I'm guessing don't need super fast clocks or electrical constraints. Without something like those ESP32 modules, this would be much more difficult.
legally?
You need evidence that the whole product complies with the EMC regulations. There's some judgement involved - if you put a certified circuit board in a plastic box, it won't change the EMC behaviour so you don't need to re-test. But if you solder a module onto a larger circuit board, you are almost certainly changing the EMC behaviour. You should definitely be re-testing something like that.
The pre-certified module does save you some time in the "intentional radiator" testing - assuming you use the same antenna it was tested with as a module, you can probably make the case that the behaviour is the same.
Will anyone ever notice or care for a few thousand niche devices? I doubt it. But to sell in the EU legally you do need to do that testing.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-rules-complian...
Most products don't require testing by a notified body. That means anyone can do the testing - or even you could do it at home. The CE mark is self-assessed - you don't have to get a lab to issue it to you.
But electronics does have to conform with various electromagnetic compatibility rules. There's effectively no way to prove that without doing EMC testing. Most non-EU manufacturers will still do EMC testing in a lab, perhaps in China. That test report becomes part of the product's technical file.
My point is that if you take a module from a 3rd party and integrate it into a larger electronic product, it no longer has the same behaviour from an EMC point of view. You have no evidence that it meets the harmonised standards for electromagnetic compatibility. Realistically, probably nobody will ever notice. But if they do, you don't have evidence that your product complies with the standard.
Don't nearly all electronics fall under it too, this is the second item after children toys in the link you posted.
> Here is a non-exhaustive list of products that are included in EU laws about CE marking:
> Toys, drones, electrical and electronic equipment, pyrotechnic products, recreational crafts and watercraft
> Don't nearly all electronics fall under it too, this is the second item after children toys in the link you posted.
No. That page just says: There are tons of EU laws about everything, including electronics. By putting a CE mark in your product, you certify that your product complies with all applicable EU laws.
In most cases, this certification can be a self-assessment, meaning that you can just assign the CE mark by whatever internal process you deem sufficient. I.e. you are allowed to rubber-stamp, but of course you are fully responsible for all consequences.
In some cases, for example childrens' toys, but only for some electronic components (electronic toys, medical stuff, high-voltage components, components that emit EM radiation above a certain threshold, ...), self-assessment isn't enough. In those cases, you need to obtain a certification from a notified body, which is an external organisation doing some design review and testing, as required by the respective laws.
It's all laid out further below under "How to obtain CE marking" and "Do you need an independent assessment?"
Just because you use a certified module doesn't give you a free pass.
To be fair, it's unintentional radiator testing that's required, rather than everything the module had to go through as an intentional radiator. So, it is a "free pass" for nearly all of it, and a much cheaper one, since you don't have to use a costly FCC accredited lab.
It is completely left up to you how you are going to demonstrate this if they ever come asking for the paperwork proving this. This can be a certification by an independent testing lab, documentation from in-house tests, or perhaps even documentation proving that it is compliant by design.
And, well -- that's certainly good.
But the FCC rules cover more than just Wifi and BT, and the whole rest of the widget also needs to comply with them. Of particular interest is FCC Part 15 Subpart B, which covers unintentional radiators. The device would need to comply with Part 15 Subpart B even if it had nothing to do with Wifi or BT.
Putting one part that is certified for one issue into a device doesn't extend a magical blanket of compliance to everything else that the whole of the widget contains.
Does the SPI or I2C bus (or anything else) leak RF beyond allowable limits? Eh, who knows. I certainly don't know. It's easy to say words like "it should be fine," but without testing then nobody actually knows.
The CE mark, meanwhile: That mark means exactly nothing in the US, where the author is located and the devices are sold from. The United States has zero regulatory recognition of any of the processes and/or tests that CE may cover. People often confuse this issue, wherein: They don't think it be like it is, but it do.
1. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-6-2007-5938-...
I don't disagree. It's important for us to recognize that we stand on the shoulders of giants, but I also think it's a little silly of a critique of someone happy about it being easier than he expected. It's true that hardware would be much harder if you had to do it all yourself, but is that meaningful? The wonders if the modern supply chain is that you don't need to do it all yourself.
Back in the glorious past, the iOS App Store either didn’t allow apps larger than 100 MiB, or at least forbade them from being downloaded over mobile connections. There’s an old blog post/Twitter thread you can find on Hacker News where an Uber engineer describes the challenges they faced in trying to keep their app under that limit. They were also rewriting the app in Swift, so some compiler patches were necessary.
But for a “boring” ride hailing app, it’s still beyond my imagination.
Microsoft Word was something like 8-10MB in the Windows 3.1 days. WordPerfect was about the same and even had a grammar checker.
The entire damn PC with DOS, Windows, and Word was 30MB.
We’ve fallen so far, we mistake the darkness for outer space.
Overcast is 37MB.
While the base functionality is fairly simple in terms of find location > send car + all the courier and different varieties of what they do. It manages do that while working in 70+ countries over 15,000 cities with multiple different languages and payment vendors and it is all done via a single application.
That is pretty neat.
Yes, it is still very bloated but it does a lot more than what it initially looks like.
But yes, I am endless impressed when you come across a binary that is tiny. Like a text editor that is 14KB, sure it is simply but it doesn't need to be anything more for most people.
I'd assume almost all of that is done server side though. Most likely the app is mostly just a wrapped website with some gps and notification code on top.
The app just calls the GeoLocation API on the device, pings that off to a server and the server responds with services available in <distance>
We're at the point now that everything is written in some sort of javascript, with a JIT compiler and JS engine...
Folks cared on how to make it all fit into what they had, maybe the RAM prices will help to bring back old practices.
https://www.uber.com/us/en/blog/how-uber-deals-with-large-io...
Comments about a Twitter thread talking about the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373462
Apple UX used to be good, not anymore sadly
https://www.simonberens.com/p/lessons-learned-shipping-500-u...
A man can dream.
Has that happened to you?
At this point I have the only stock of this part in the world, and it's more than a lifetime supply, but otherwise I'd have been faced with a re-design and limited options.
For another of my products, during the pandemic, the part I was using became unavailable, and I had to re-design my board to accommodate a part of the same type in a different package. Then I couldn't buy either part, but found an odd lot at a Texas Instruments factory in China, which I bought.
Dealing with shortage and obsolescence issues is a constant battle. There have been crises in the industry caused by plants catching on fire.
They're making you nothing, they're going to vanish into the nether if the documentation is lost....
[0] https://www.audioholics.com/news/fire-destroys-akm-audio-chi...
We’re one decade into cookie banners and privacy regulations by jurisdiction. There’s some vague similarities with interference here.
dont threaten me with a good time :)
... But also that needs to be an official measurement, and if you're sloppy you can measure it wrong during your own testing and then be surprised.
I work in games, we run into this problem all the time ("Your IPA binary is too big, fix it and resubmit", ditto for other publishers).
... that's a very normal constraint in many fields of SWE?
So there's a fair amount of stuff that just doesn't make it there, there's a whole business now on re-selling non-delivered packages.
And with that also comes the services, the reason they leave it at the door, or in the bin, or yeet it onto the roof. Is because there's no profit margin anymore for the delivery person to wait 30s each time for someone to answer.
Not only that but every single update you push requires paying $$$$$ to get certified. It is freeing that the cost of releasing a fix or improvement to a product is $0.
In the past I considered selling a custom adapter to hobbyists, but all the certification costs just did not make it a viable option to pursue. I didn't want to up front thousands of dollars to make like $100 if I was lucky.