How do they sell those boards?
It's my dream one day to start manufacturing and selling electronics. However, it's not an easy road ahead. Seems like EU laws are a big obstacle. I'm not saying those laws are bad. They probably protect everyone, however it is hard to start selling electronics parts.
So in previous post I found this project on GitHub by Yatin-Khurana [1]. It's an open source 3D printer main board. It's not a toy, it probably could compete with some of those big main boards from Bigtreetach. What's interesting to me about this open source project is how they sell those boards. On Tindie which is a website for buying and selling DIY electronics, they sell those boards. However, boards do not have any certificates which are usually required to sell in the EU, and in the US it's similar, but under a different name. Nevertheless, they do sell those boards and have an interesting disclaimer in their description, here is just a small part of it:
"DISCLAIMER: This product is sold as a development board and is not certified by CE, FCC, or any other regulatory bodies. It is the sole responsibility of the integrator or manufacturer to ensure that the final device incorporating this board complies with all applicable local and global laws and certifications." ~ Boltz R&D store [2]
This disclaimer seems honest, and with that it seems that they can somewhat mitigate the CE certificate for EU. Since I'm not a lawyer, and I do not understand the subject, I asked AI, and it said:
"Yes. That disclaimer is generally legitimate and fairly common for electronics development boards, but it has important implications."
"If you resell the board in EU
This is where things become more complicated.
If you import 100 of these boards and sell them as products, EU authorities could consider you the importer/distributor (or even manufacturer in some situations), and you may have obligations regarding CE compliance depending on exactly what the product is and how it is marketed." ~ ChatGPT
So it's not as simple as that to get around CE. It is harsh for small business that starts with one product to go through certification that costs a lot of money to be done. My guess is that it is possible to sell a few, lets say under 100 overall products without that CE certification. At that point you would probably get enough money to pay for those testings that need to be done in professional labs.
[1] https://github.com/BoltzRnD/SmartPrintCoreH7x
[2] https://www.tindie.com/products/boltzrnd/smartprintcoreh7x-mainboard/
