Comment by rmoriz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmoriz | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced. Despite the cpu the specs looks like some 2011ish TI PandaBoard. Slow usb2 i/o and no SATA ports won't be able to compete against low-end development boards (SolidRun HummingBoard or Radxa Rock Pro). While 64bit 8core ARM is something interesting, the low i/o speeds and ports rather limit any "computational" usage.

Finally, the main reason not to build products out of the variety of ARM development boards is IMHO the missing CE/FCC certification for retail products. Afaik every board including the Raspberry PIs are only for demo/lab purposes. So if you build some embedded server product you'll do have the bureaucracy and costs. At least they should offer 2-3 FCC/CE ready combinations of boards+cases ready to be deployed in the wild.

In my eyes those boards are just an replacement for the Texas Instruments PandaBoards which are discontinued because TI gave up their OMAP business a while ago and the typical low-cost board makers are using cheap dual/quad-core 32bit A8 and A9 IP.

A lot of companies, like where I work, purchase boards like this as a reference implementation. Ultimately at least for us, FCC and CE become conformance studies against our own product in this case.

But I could see this being a problem for companies reselling these boards inside some product they put out.

The Rpi and beaglebone and the like are most definitely CE/FCC certified.

nope

"This evaluation board/kit is intended for use for ENGINEERING DEVELOPMENT, DEMONSTRATION, OR EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY"

Seems that the RasPi is: http://www.raspberrypi.org/tag/ce-compliance/ . Apparently they were forced into it by their distributors.

Interesting, the pictures show it being tested without a case. At the frequencies it uses, I would expect it not to pass without some kind of shielding.

Do you know if the Raspberry Pi 2 has been tested yet?

I don't know: I tried to search for an answer but found nothing. I assume it has, on the basis that the distributors would probably have the same objections to selling it uncertified.

It's probably hard to get a CE mark or FCC certification for a PCB-style product, right? Those organizations probably want to know about emissions but it doesn't make sense to measure a PCB for radiated emissions since it has so few protections against it.

Arguably, that's your job -- when you buy the PCB you are planning to integrate it with an enclosure that will solve those problems and now that you've designed this new product you should get the certifications.

AFAIK the big problem without a case is Wifi/BT (and maybe an RTC) - that said if the vendors would at least get an class B certification for one pcb+case combination they could probably improve OEM shipments.

Some commenters say the Raspberry PI got a Class B certification without having a case - but it also has no Wifi/BT/RTC - so this could be possible.

You're basically right with the second paragraph; a Pi in a box is a different "product" from a Pi under CE rules, and the person putting the Pi in the box and selling it is a "manufacturer" with all the CE and WEEE liabilities thereof.

The Pi is certified for radiated emissions - as "EN 55022 Class A product". http://docs-europe.electrocomponents.com/webdocs/109e/090076... See discussion of class A vs class B: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-TR... Effectively, this puts some of the interference mitigation responsibility onto the customer.

It's entirely missing the ESD certifications which might normally be applied to cased products. If it had wifi that would trigger a whole other class of certification requirements.

The whole thing is tedious and hateful. I wish there was some way to get rid of it without people immediately flooding the market with cheap high emission SMPS.

The thing is, people are flooding the market with cheap noisy crap anyway, distributed as any of hundreds of non-brands and shipped directly to the customer from outside the regulatory area. Technically it falls upon customs to stop these from entering, but customs is not qualified to do compatibility testing. Personally I think the correct response would be a customer protection law that requires that manufacturers and vendors take back/replace problematic products, rather than forcing pre-certification and membership in predatory organizations on everyone. The current regulatory environment (particularly WEEE) is toxic to any kind of small-scale manufacture, not because of the specific requirements imposed, but because of the gigantic costs of complying with said requirements in a regulation-approved way.

How about just changing it to be more sensible, as an interim solution?

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