A relative designed and built a physical product and when through that problem.
According to his experience the hardest requirements were about high voltage and electromagnetic interference (both how your device interferes with others, and how others affect yours). He also had mechanical requirements but that was fairly easy to test himself.
He was able to design his device to not use any high voltage. Basically buy the power supply off the shelf and don't enclose it in your product.
For EMI, it's hard and expensive. Specialized companies will test and certify your device, but this is too expensive. He found a laboratory in a local university for a reasonable price who was able to help design, define some minimum testing to reasonably ensure compliance without breaking the bank, and realize the tests. It was long and a significant budget.
A lot of his BOM are components from China. His conclusion is that you cannot trust in any way their CE marking. Some pass, others don't. They are all marked. You need to test yourself.
For low volume "artisanal" products, it looks like a lot of people just don't perform rigorous (professional) tests, they just test whatever they at home, mark it and hope they never get into trouble.
> A lot of his BOM are components from China. His conclusion is that you cannot trust in any way their CE marking. Some pass, others don't. They are all marked. You need to test yourself.
yeah, that's tricky. Testing whether an ESP32 complies with CE sounds very difficult and pricy. I suppose if they are bought in the EU though that it's up to the supplier that you buy it from to make sure it's CE compliant.
> For EMI, it's hard and expensive. Specialized companies will test and certify your device, but this is too expensive.
Yeah, I actually did find a UK-based test lab that does it more cheaply. Indeed I planned to send my device there and mainly just verify EMI for CE conformance of my device. It's good to get some confirmation that this is the main test required.
My relative's device was controlled by an Arduino so indeed that was easier to trust. The untrustworthy Chinese components were more actuators, pumps, and so on, so easier to test than an MCU.
One advice concerning EMI is that it's one thing to certify the finished design, but it's tricky to design it right if you're not experienced with EMI. Before testing it's worth having some advice and design review with the specialists to see if they think the tests will pass and how to improve it.
According to his experience the hardest requirements were about high voltage and electromagnetic interference (both how your device interferes with others, and how others affect yours). He also had mechanical requirements but that was fairly easy to test himself.
He was able to design his device to not use any high voltage. Basically buy the power supply off the shelf and don't enclose it in your product.
For EMI, it's hard and expensive. Specialized companies will test and certify your device, but this is too expensive. He found a laboratory in a local university for a reasonable price who was able to help design, define some minimum testing to reasonably ensure compliance without breaking the bank, and realize the tests. It was long and a significant budget.
A lot of his BOM are components from China. His conclusion is that you cannot trust in any way their CE marking. Some pass, others don't. They are all marked. You need to test yourself.
For low volume "artisanal" products, it looks like a lot of people just don't perform rigorous (professional) tests, they just test whatever they at home, mark it and hope they never get into trouble.