You can see how well the "regulation but no enforcement" regime is working by picking up any disposable vape from the street and looking for the WEEE "do not bin" symbol. It will probably be there.
Then Germany rejected again because the "CE" was obviously in the wrong style, on a generic sticker (I'd warned, but been told "It'll be /fine/."). And German Customs said our slip directing customers to our site for setup and operating instructions was insufficient. This time, they held our units until we sent satisfactory documentation.
Finally, we were able to send, but with after a warning from Customs that a third error would result in permanent bannage and seizure at the border of anything we sent to Germany.
Broadly and simplified:
Adding a bluetooth module means that, not only is the device no longer "electrically equivalent" (which means you are re-certing), but you have gone from "unintentional radiator" to "intentional", which means you have a different and/or additional set of standards.
A pre-certified module (as in, it has modular approval) under FCC means you do not have to test the "intentional radiator" part the module PROVIDED you exactly follow the instructions of the module supplier AND you don't do anything "stupid".
Under CE, pre-certified module isn't a thing. It will certainly help you pass from a technical standpoint, but doesn't really let you "short-cut" the testing and paper work.
Hope that makes sense and gives a rough idea.
edit Apologies for rehashing what others have already said. I should have refreshed.
The device is what gets certified, not its parts.
That pretty much describes my own experience as a Director of Engineering for a company doing digital TV and enquiring of manufacturers in Korea about a custom remote control for one customer who wanted big buttons for "Burger", "Beer" and "Porn".
I wonder what causes this hardware/software incompatibility.
Heck even software-only companies have problems with this where the technical leadership is, for example, of backend background and they completely fail in frontend and data analysis fronts while having rock solid security.
What even would that role be called? I suppose CTO but if a company that does HW and SW.
Also there's T shaped skills and there's you with:
_________
/|\
/ | \
/ | \
/ | \
No snark taken, I’ve got plenty of blind spots in my skills so those T stems should be a little shallower probably but I’ve been fortunate to cover a lot of ground in the last 15 years.
Because of the focus on mass manufacturing, hardware is incredibly expensive to change. The industry seems to have centered around doing more planning up front.
But we (software people), learned 20 years ago (from select Hardware companies) that this is backwards. If the cost of change is high, and that's where your pain is, change more frequently. Mitigate that pain and make it a strength. (See: Toyota Production System)
I have a product with an addressable market of something like 300 to 500 units per year. That puts me in the Defense/Aerospace/Medical area, where unit economics are completely insane.
And yes. It does feel like being ripped off when someone puts ~30 minutes ($20 max) of Western labor into something and then turns around and charges me $800 for the privilege of supporting an American company.
Ironically, Toyota is moving to gigacasting (large, single piece casting) to reduce costs [1]
[1]: https://insideevs.com/news/687481/toyota-new-ev-production-l...
I guess these giga casts are not very repairable.
Every collision with body damage fixed by an autobody shop is stealing money from our overlords.
This doesn't detract at all from Toyota's ideal batch size of 1, or from the lessons they learned and shared on the way to such huge scale.
My claim is that we (the West) are failing to succeed in manufacturing (and have been for decades) because our focus is on quantity and the very people who could solve the core problems will be so busy planning out the next 2 years, they will not see the wave cresting above their heads.
So as a senior expert in your field, you make $20/hr? Because I don’t know any field that charges by the half hour, and I don’t know any senior engineers that make minimum wage to do their job but maybe you’re the first.
That’s not including the markup the company would need to add assuming you aren’t dealing with an independent contractor.
Not that it detracts from your overall point, but some of the best paid knowledge workers on the planet - lawyers - regularly bill out in 6-minute increments.
Beyond that, just the average documented phenomenon of task switching is 20 minutes or 0.3hrs, so your "only six minute" project really costs the engineer 0.3+0.1+0.3 hours.
But sure, if you are in a long-term project (here defined as more than an hour or two total), you may see line items on your bill of 0.1 or 0.2 hours in a day for a quick call or something.
Are you such a knowledge worker? Could someone actually describe to you a problem worthy of your consideration, give you time to think/calculate, then describe a response in only six minutes? Sure, there might be some such edge cases, but commonly?
Drive to analyze a broken electrical box at customer. Analyze what is wrong. Read the schematics. Repair it (without getting fried). 15 minute repair. 2 hour drive. Zero glory, just a shitty job.
Or exchange something that was manufactured wrong and test it. Climb to a wind turbine, open the box. Exchange a component. Test it. Climb to another 50 towers to fix same problem.
Testing short batches of custom products. The testers are paid more when compared to blue collars, but still earn shit. Also everyone assumes that they are "factory workers" while they program their elecronic testers in C++. Paid a fraction of what the FAANG intern earns.
Life is unfair to many many people. Looking at your post and above - it feels like you are some guys in IT who dont know how hard it is in other areas.
Other alternative are bookkeepers, who run books for multiple small customers. Get easy to impossible questions about tax law - all day every day. From your 200+ clients to whom you provide advice by phone. For which they dont want to pay.
A team of few accountants tries to book invoices and fill taxes from their clients, while being bombared by questions. Often super tough questions. Literally 0/10 experience for a knowledge worker. Every day.
This is what I find so profoundly offensive when so many Western companies charge insane labor rates. I know for a fact that very little of that money is going to the person doing the work.
While it is very unlikely that you'd be able to get and pay for only a six-minute increment of service from a professional, those pros put in a LOT of time outside the six-minute increments for which they are billed out.
An attny in the family has a specific external billing rate and required yearly billable hours to produce. Yet she is burdened with literally hundreds of hours of extra admin, firm, "culture & innovation", interruptions, etc. work (much of which should be done by paralegals, clerks etc.), for which no credit is given. I've seen similar in mech/elec engineering.
I'm taking about working with someone who repeatedly moves materials through a long established process.
It can be arduous and unpleasant and rarely pays very much. We can debate the ethics of all that, but it's not reasonable IMO to pay pennies and charge 40x.
If you are just looking at it as labor then yeah, you are going to feel ripped off.
But it is not just labor, it is labor + overhead: Office space Tools required for job Paperwork associated with the job
I'm not in SF.
Workshop space here rents for like $1-2/ft.
Paperwork isn't hundreds per hour.
Yes. I agree, machine tools are outrageously priced, but it's not quite that bad.
We've got problems here that need attention.
I have manufactured in that area and while you are not going to be in the mass volume pricing levels, you don't have to be in the defense level either. You just have to build the product with the right trade-offs and design the appropriate manufacturing processes. Few seem to know how to do this.
I've burned tens of thousands of dollars with them. They have tons of sales, little to no support. They have zero ability to stick with a vendor who does good work. They're a total crap shoot on quality and no responsibility when it fails.
"The Handyman's Invoice" is apocryphal in the details, but almost certainly true in that something basically like it happens all the time.
" The Graybeard engineer retired and a few weeks later the Big Machine broke down, which was essential to the company’s revenue.
The Manager couldn’t get the machine to work again so the company called in Graybeard as an independent consultant.
Graybeard agrees. He walks into the factory, takes a look at the Big Machine, grabs a sledge hammer, and whacks the machine once whereupon the machine starts right up.
Graybeard leaves and the company is making money again.
The next day Manager receives a bill from Graybeard for $5,000.
Manager is furious at the price and refuses to pay.
Graybeard assures him that it’s a fair price.
Manager retorts that if it’s a fair price Graybeard won’t mind itemizing the bill.
Graybeard agrees that this is a fair request and complies.
The new, itemized bill reads….
Hammer: $5 Knowing where to hit the machine with hammer: $4995 "
Sometimes you just need someone with a little dexterity and a willingness to care about their work.
That person shouldn't be billed out at hundreds of dollars per hour, especially when they're almost certainly being paid closer to $15.
There are plenty of different fabrication technologies to suit different scales. Some listed by other commenters.
I agree iteration is good, and good hardware companies do iterate hardware. It's something I have always been a proponent of as a hardware engineer. But also the reality is that everything in hardware land costs 10-100 times as much and takes 10-100 times longer.
To properly develop and iterate on hardware, you need to do upfront investment. You need:
1) Tools for the hardware engineers (scopes, spec-ans, tool shop, test equipment). [In software parlance, download the IDE, debuggers and libraries. You're not going to ask your developers to work without those. That would be ludicrous.]
2) You need to iterate EARLY in the product cycle process and this costs money (but still much less than changing your final tooling). [Software parlance again: You only ever really edit the source code. You would never ask a developer to binary patch a compiler to fix issues in your source code. This is what you're doing IMO when changing final tooling on a product.]
3) You need to account for lead times for fabrication and shipping of a physical thing. [Software parlance again: Compiling takes days to weeks. QA weeks to months.]
I think software majority companies struggle with these because (when compared to hardware):
1) Software tooling is essentially free.
2) You can stop and go back to the source code to re-iterate at any time and the down stream processes to "finish the iteration".
3) Time for iteration is seconds, minutes maybe hours while you wait for a compiler to run.
Speaking about Toyota Production System: This has many misconceptions as nobody ever seems to actually read the source material. One of these myths is iterations. Toyota iterate often and EARLY. You get the part right and THEN you can THINK about final tooling. They don't iterate on final tooling, that is expensive and time consuming.
I would say with some work and trade offs you can save on your product in the 300-500 range. You shouldn't be in the Defense/Aerospace/Medical area unless you are doing something quite esoteric.
As others have stated on the final point (but I will reiterate) no senior software person in the US would be happy with $20 for 30 minutes.
I suppose it's possible we've reached the end of history and there's just no way anyone is ever going to meaningfully improve on the production systems that we have today.
They're basically perfect, right?
There also really aren't any small markets worth serving. Like people with disabilities as one example.
Perhaps we'll just stop trying to build small batch products inexpensively because it's so hard and also those CEOs need 40x markups on labor to make ends meet.
Maybe I'm wrong about the direction, maybe tool and hardware companies should double down on big design up front and extend the time it takes to do their job.
Maybe, but I sincerely doubt it.
There are also safety concerns, temperature and humidity testing, and so on to consider.
Think of it this way: If current runs through it, you need to cert it. Period.
Edit: I think the Pi might already have FCC so if you are NOT electrically altering the Pi in anyway, then you won't need to re-cert (as you are essentially installing software on it and for a consumer device FCC doesn't have ESD requirements).
For CE, depending on the directive, you'd need to do ESD (adding a box will alter that).
Disclaimer: Not compliance advice.
I consult on product development and I'd say about 50% the time, software majority companies think you are trying to rip them off somehow when you try to explain everything that is NOT software that needs to be done, what it costs and how long it takes (and how important it is to lock things in early as you can't just "push out a patch" for a $50,000 molding tool or that you can't just "slap bluetooth in later" and not redo all of your EMC certs).