Selling your products on Tindie (or elsewhere) without FCC or CE certification?
Evan Juras wrote 12/01/2017 at 22:56 • 3 pointsThe FCC states that all electronic devices sold in the United States must be authorized by the FCC. (https://www.fcc.gov/engineering-technology/laboratory-division/general/equipment-authorization) Additionally, most products must have CE certification to be sold in Europe.
Both these certifications require laboratory testing to various test standards (such as measuring the radiated emissions from your product to verify they are within allowable levels). It seems like most of the products currently being sold on Tindie do not have these certifications. Are the sellers of the products at risk of being fined by the FCC or EU? Are the sales volumes low enough to avoid being recognized by the FCC / EU?
Does anyone have experience dealing with getting FCC or CE certifications (or other third-party certifications such as UL) for your Tindie product? People who are currently selling electronic products, what have you done in regards to getting certified by the FCC/EU? If I want to sell a product on Tindie or elsewhere, do I need to worry about getting it FCC tested? Would I be at risk of getting fined?
One popular Hackaday product that comes to mind is OpenMV (https://openmv.io/). Did this product have to undergo FCC emissions testing to be sold in the US? I can't find any certification information on the website.
Sorry for the long question, any input or information from anyone who has had experience with this topic would be appreciated!
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You might like to check out the transcript from the Certifications Tindie Chat we did earlier in the year - https://hackaday.io/event/19387-tindiechat/log/54109-tindiechat-transcript-feb-28-2017-certifications
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https://hackaday.io/event/19387-tindiechat/log/54109-tindiechat-transcript-feb-28-2017-certifications
https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/398
https://www.emcfastpass.com/cert-ebook/
This came up the other day, those links might help finding an answerAre you sure? yes | no
Cool, I will check these out, thank you!
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Thanks Dave.
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Thanks for those links. I'm looking at "exempted product categories" (section 15.103) and most of them are “digital” devices, why not simply “electronic”? The way it's written makes it sound like adding an ADC could make a device exempt.
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Most things sold on Tindie are not products, but modules, components and kits — and those don't have to have the certification. The assumption is that any product built with those would need to be certified as a whole anyways, and the person building it is responsible for that.
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Is the OpenMV a device or a component?
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