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Raspberry Pi Passes EU Electromagnetic Compatibility Testing
A week ago, we posted news of the delay that the Raspberry Pi Foundation faced because of a requirement that their boards be tested to comply with EU regulations. Now, the word is in, and the Raspberry Pi passed those tests without needing any modifications. From their post describing the ordeal: "The Raspberry Pi had to pass radiated and conducted emissions and immunity tests in a variety of configurations (a single run can take hours), and was subjected to electrostatic discharge (ESD) testing to establish its robustness to being rubbed on a cat. It’s a long process, involving a scary padded room full of blue cones, turntables that rise and fall on demand, and a thing that looks a lot like a television aerial crossed with Cthulhu."
Thank goodness it passed the cat rubbing test. We Europeans love rubbing electronic devices on our cats.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
I actually thought the comment was tongue-in-cheek, so, no I am not scared by them.
The PR person is a food blogger who does this for free in her spare time because she is married to one of the foundation Trustees. Cut her a little slack.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I'm sure that not every product passes this test, otherwise the test wouldn't be necessary :p
All electronics that are going to be sold, as finished products, in the European economic area (EEA) have to be tested and comply with European standards. It's the short answer, and I'm skipping a lot of details.
The problem the Raspberry-foundation faced was that it was initially not a "finished" product, more of a DIY kit. Once it became clear it was more of a "consumer" product it had to comply and be tested.
The same applies in the US where the FCC has the same role, but labs do the actual testing in both jurisdictions.
From TFA:
A cute story. Radiated immunity testing involves hitting the Raspberry Pi hard with narrow-band EM radiation, while checking (amongst many other things) that the device is still able to send Ethernet frames to a hub. The first time the team did this, the light on the hub stopped blinking: no frames were making it through. They did it again: still nothing. Finally, they discovered that the hub (which, I should point out, gave every appearance of being CE marked, so it should have been able to get through these tests itself) was being knocked out every time somebody pressed the button. Jimmy used a longer cable, put the hub outside the field, and found that the Raspberry Pi got through its immunity tests with no problems at all.
Too bad their CE certified ethernet hub failed the CE testing.... remember kids, this is what you get when you buy cheap stuff from cheap manufacturing countries.... oh wait!
The issue is with the distributors, not the RaspPi people.
Farnell and RS got nervous when they realized how many of the boards they would be shipping. There is not the same requirement for low volume eval boards they sell as engineering prototypes.
The Foundation always planned on obtaining the CE mark for the Raspberry Pi boards during the main launch, which will come in the future when schools have their curricula worked out and huge numbers of the finished devices (in enclosures mostly) will be going out to schoolchildren. Right now the boards are seen as a preliminary release. The Foundation had CE certification on the schedule. Just not this soon.
"they claimed they already gave 10000 boards to distributors"
Errr.... NO.
The first batch of 10000 was produced. When these arrived in the UK, the Foundation performed full functional testing on samples from the batch (as compared to electrical tests carried out at the factory) and discovered that the manufacturers had substituted a certain component between the first manufacturing samples and batch production. All the production was returned to the manufacturer for rework, which has taken some time. Reworked stock is now in the UK and going into distribution. Delivery is now contingent on RS and Farnell receiving copies of the test results so they are satisfied in their own minds that the Raspberry Pi can be sent out. Neither RS Components or Farnell have had "a 10k batch" to hand. Ever.
Its all on the Raspberry Pi forum you know. Whats "nice" is your complete lack of knowledge and comprehension. :-)
Generally there is a small ROM embedded in CPU that loads another bootloader from NAND, SD card, SPI Flash, etc. On Atmel ARM chips that bootloader must be small enough to fit into embedded SRAM. Than bootloader initializes SDRAM and fetches U-Boot into it. U-Boot in turn may initialize wider range of devices and then load Linux kernel.
All boot process is very SoC- and board-specific. Bootloaders must be compiled for selected CPU and board components, and Linux kernel should also have board description down to what types of chips are installed as autodetection is usually very limited.