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Comment by trav4225 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting -- I (incorrectly?) assumed this would need to be approved by several regulatory bodies in order to be legal to sell...

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Well, technically, since this device contains a clock, it should go through FCC Part 15 Verification before being sold. However, the FCC doesn't really have the budget to go after every board produced, you have to REALLY mess up to get on their radar...

Since it is USB based, it should technically go through USB-IF interoperability testing, if he wants to use the USB logo. Though actually it looks like he has a VID/PID allocated from SiLabs for this, which is already way better than a lot of inexpensive USB products.

Yeah I'm not sure about the legals and just figured it would be fine. I did get a VID/PID from SiLabs which has already done USB certification for the chip.

FIDO U2F also has a $10k certification process to allow you to use the FIDO logo. I don't think it's worth pursuing for me.

Thank you both for the clarification!

Though, if you can budget to go through FCC Verification testing (class B), maybe around $1000-1500 depending on your test house, it can sometimes be quite a useful learning experience for a board of moderate complexity. It is surprising where RF leaks out of these days. For a device that is this simple, it is probably fine. Officially, my opinion is that you should always have all the proper certifications in place.

Unfortunately, the $10k U2F certification is not that unreasonable compared to other similar certifications I have seen... As the fees don't just cover interoperability testing, but also legal fees if the trademark or specification must be defended.

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