There are so few resources or guides and the like for EMC and EMI certification and the like, especially for OSHW and like small business stuff.
It seems like a lot of people selling hardware stuff, especially the smaller ones just, ignore it?
I mean I don't blame them, EMC Pre-compliance testing equipment is expensive, and getting the compliance cert actually done is also super expensive.
Expensive enough to sink some smaller companies.
But also how can you not be anxious of the FCC et. al. smacking you?
I think most manage to skate on being able to be classified as a "sub-assembly" but that's a really really tight definition.
I wish more companies that do OSHW were able to clear up some light on this.
there is a big hole in the whole working umwelt of OSHW, in this specific place.
some of us are definitely more careful than others - we might know friends who have a spectral analyzer, and know how to use it - and we're not silly enough to de-can those ESP8266/ESP32 modules.
but a vast majority of these small-time, small-batch projects tend to just, hope for the best.
hope they're not spewing harmonics across restricted mil or avcomm/avionics frequencies.
hope Part 15 can keep them in line enough to not get smacked by the FCC, or IC, or Ofcom.
hope the couple milliwatts it draws serves as an effective maximum for any kind of radiating power it has, no matter how long the wire is that's coming off its DMA PIO port.
I fear for the day when that hope runs out, and someone legitimately slaps an amateur or hobbyist that's selling like, a video adapter board or a ROM cartridge or a disk drive emulator, because someone happened to be using one in a handheld computer or game system at an airport, and it makes the radar completely green-out on the full sweep, and buzzes Guard all the meanwhile, completely unbeknownst to the user.
like, a legitimately cool thing, would be for something collaborative and community/social oriented, to exist in the oshw/hackerware type scenes, for EMC validation - if not certification (and all the legal/engineering practice implications that come with the specific term, "certification").
It should be done with the expensive test equipment and chambered environments and 12-packs of LeCroy held by a trustworthy oshw-aligned group. something like underwriters', but less formal and less official, serving mainly as an advisory compliance validation rather than a certification of compliance proper, and for a fraction of the price. like, a small fee or donations keep the thing running, but the only thing you'd have to pay - especially if you're low income or oppressed - is postage and enough to cover how long it takes for someone to boop your target on the workbench and print out analysis forms and a QR code with (a link to) your results.
eventually, such a group can move on to making OSHW test equipment, scopes and analyzers, broadband spec-an's and anechoic chambers, with open-source hardware and software, producing plans and source code for this kind of thing.
