chambertime

It's live at https://developer.dogpile.com/ if you want to try it. Would love feedback too!

Thanks for finding a data quality issue and reporting it.

Thank you for these amazing insights.

Interesting so like a power supply module that has already gotten full modular approval? Do you have an example link to one of those? Thanks

Thanks for catching that, fixed! Legend didnt match because I made a mistake when I tried to clean up the contrast in the pie chart.

There's skills if you want. I didn't want to do that since I don't feel like I need the smarts to work on the LLM wiki in every coding session. I like to keep my context clean and scoped to what I'm working on.

I am running this in a long running session that spawns a subagent once an hour. So the context of the main session doesn't get out of control.

Git + claude code in yolo mode. In the first prompt, I passed it Kaparthy's gist, and had it put together a high level plan of all of the sections that needed to be written to complete a vision I provided. Essentially put together a complete wiki on everything for getting global hardware certification.

I then had it loop once an hour. It would pick the next wiki to write, research it, gather raw sources, and then synthesize the wiki for me and push. I could nudge it in between hours if I wanted.

I think this increases the relevancy for these tools and information. Gone will be the days of just sending your design to manufacturer in China and having it get fully certified and built through just one contact.

This is a valid concern. For the time being I'd expect Taiwanese labs to be a price comparable alternative, but this is a likely outcome.

The content of the site is, as stated in my first comment and in the article itself, a nice looking wrapper on top of in essence, an llm Wiki that I put together with the help of Claude on the hardware certification universe. While I was building this data set out, I uncovered that the FCC had this vote today, so I thought it would be a good thing to share since it's timely and because I had just collected all of the relevant information tolp someone figure out how this impacts their hardware certification process (I use voice transcription to write this comment)

I very much appreciate your feedback. As I look at the article now. I totally see what you're saying. I should have let off what was going on with the vote today since that's what I referenced in the title of the post on here.

My poor Reddit has been taken over by bots :(

Well I couldn't find any other thorough dataset on this topic, so in that sense this is non-obvious since it took weeks to assemble the information. And it was fun doing it using the LLM Wiki technique.

Well there's a bit more to it than that. It depends on if you're making an intentional radiator. I have another flow chart on the site that helps you figure out if you need to send your device to a testing lab or not.

Clank clank, beep boop. You should walk to the car wash since its only 30m away ;)

Thanks for that insight on how the Chinese labs are perceived amongst hardware engineers.

I know pie charts are decisive. I thought they were visually helpful in this instance.

73 fellow ham radio operator!

Yeah, this article is really focused on FCC certification. But to your point, there are other sections on the site that are focused on CE certification and how to navigate getting certified so you can sell throughout the world.

That uncomfortable feeling when someone calls you an LLM...

I've been building a certification intelligence tool for hardware teams (markready.io) and needed a good test lab directory. The FCC publishes accreditation data through a Socrata API but it's pretty bare - names, addresses, designation numbers, and expiration dates that are often years stale. No websites, no capabilities, nothing to tell you whether a lab is a two-person shop or an Intertek subsidiary.

The first thing I did was build an LLM-maintained wiki about the hardware certification universe - FCC rule parts, equipment authorization types, test standards, the TCB system, international equivalents, all of it. About 30 pages of structured knowledge that Claude could reference when doing the actual enrichment work. Then I ran a loop of subagents over multiple days to enrich the labs - pulling from the Socrata API, cross-referencing TCB registrations to see which labs can certify (not just test), hitting Google Places for websites and coordinates, crawling accreditation body directories to figure out which labs are actually still active. The FCC's own expiration dates are useless for this - tons of labs show 2022 or 2023 dates but are clearly still operating. Claude synthesized the descriptions and capabilities from all the scraped data into structured records, using the wiki as context.

The directory is at markready.io/labs. You can browse by country, US state, and TCB status.

Today's an interesting day to launch this because the FCC is voting to ban all 126 test labs in China and Hong Kong. Not just the government-controlled ones they banned last year - all of them. 21% of the global total gone. 27 of those 126 are Western firms (Intertek, SGS, TUV, UL) operating China offices. I wrote up the full impact analysis at markready.io/blog/fcc-bad-labs-vote.

Full disclosure: I've never actually gotten a device through FCC certification myself. I've been building RF hardware since I was a kid but always on the hobby side. What pulled me into this was the data problem - the FCC publishes all this information but nobody had stitched it together into anything usable, and it felt like a genuinely interesting dataset to enrich and a real gap in understanding the hardware product space.

Built with Next.js + Cloudflare. The enriched dataset covers 28 countries.