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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

FCC certification are also a roadblock of sorts for product development.

In theory, I should do testing for verification and or "declaration of conformity" for any run over 5 devices where I have a clock over 1.705 MHz for a battery-only device or over 9 kHz (yes, KILO-Hertz) for a digital device that plugs in, even to recharge batteries.

UL (or equivalent) testing/listing isn't required by law, but represents additional possible expenses if you want to sell to consumers.

It's already pretty daunting, tech-wise, to make the leap from "I have an idea" to "works on my bench on protoboard" to "works on my custom-designed PCB", but at least the out-of-pocket costs and risks are low there.

It's a much greater leap, cost-wise, to get the FCC paperwork in order, even for "unintentional radiators", to say nothing of trying to get a BTLE or wifi device certified.

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BTLE and WiFi are getting a bit easier thankfully. I know the TI CC3000 doesn't require intentional emitter testing if the recommended design is followed which saves a _lot_ of money and time. [0]

Agreed that FCC unintentional emitter testing can be a pain, however, unless you're doing something very fancy it's not that hard to achieve, and it's not super expensive if you just need a low frequency unintentional testing.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think you can self declare as well for unintentional emitters, just if you get caught the penalties are much stricter than if you can prove you went through a lab.

[0] http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/CC3000_Product_Certi...

Any idea on the cost for unintentional radiator testing (assuming a clean first-time pass)? I was assuming "4 figures and up"

Edit (after the first two replies below): I'm assuming a slow-clock device, say 20 MHz or less, as that's the limit of my PCB design skills anyway...

Depends on a lot of factors: how big (reputable) the company doing the testing is, how big your device is, what voltages your devices runs on, what frequencies are on the board, number of I/O, number of configurations to test (to explain the last part, say your device can either run off USB or ethernet, you'll probably need to test both).

For something simple (clocks less than 200mhz), usually half a day of testing will cost between 1k and 2k I think. However, take these numbers with a grain of salt.

EDIT: they can also help you track down leaks and pass through testing the first time as well (i.e. say you're leaking tons of RF through a badly shielded ethernet port. They can track it down, and will have copper tape so you can test to see if a simple patch will fix it, which if the testing is much more expensive might be an acceptable step to add to your assembly procedure vs. doing a respin of the board).

Our rule of thumb is 30k per product for all tests/rework/retests.

And never assume a clean first-time pass.

I've run a few products through FCC and CE testing, all including motor drivers (noisy) and USB ports (computer peripheral requirements for CE), running on multiple power supplies. Each failed a few tests at least a few times, typical price from start to finish from the testing facility (Austin, TX) was an average of $16k/device from first test to passing report. Not including our costs for travel or re-work.

So there's a question. How do you reimagine certification testing to cut the cost 10x.

I don't know. There's no doubt a big entrenched market of providers with negative incentive to do that, and I'm not even sure that I see a lot of benefit to the FCC to change the process.

If I was a government employee, I'd probably think it was right and proper to better protect Americans from stray radio interference from slipshod products than to reduce the one-time NRE charges to bring those products to market. It's not that I'm accusing them of shallow-mindedness, just that they have a perspective that the current process is working pretty well. (My perspective of trying to do a production run of 250 or 500 units of something is entirely different, but I can't make a compelling argument that "fixes" my problem without imagining that I might be introducing other, worse-on-balance problems.)

I should state up front I know nothing about the certification process. I agree, there is a lot of benefit to having a working system, even if it means barrier to entry is high. It sounds from your comment like most of the cost is due to the regulatory structure, and not from the testing end, is that right? I'd love to see a cost breakdown of doing a certification. Someone else quoted $250-500/hr for testing. What goes in to that? Testing equipment? Facility build out? Testing technicians?

You're totally right. Obviously, I've never gotten that far along.

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