does the Core need a CE certification and does it come with a manual?
I ask because here in germany ALL electic kickstarter project is now sent from the customs to the Bundesnetzagentur for checking the CE mark and manual first. The Bundesnetzagentur is an agency to check and validate electic products against national standards which are imported to germany.
If you follow Pebble and Ouya, they’re having huge troubes getting their product into germany because of missing / incomplete CE certification and manuals.
Please take this into account when shipping the core.
Thanks for raising the issue @Asfaloth; this is something we are currently researching, but we don’t believe it will be an issue for us. There are a few reasons for this:
Because our product is a circuit board and not a “consumer product”, it doesn’t fall under the same rules as products like Pebble and Ouya. We believe that a product of this type does not require FCC/CE/IC certification to ship and pass through customs. However, I will admit that it is difficult to get a straight answer on this.
All that said, we believe that we will have full FCC/CE/IC certification, because the Wi-Fi module itself is certified for all of the above, and we expect to use the same antenna that is already in the certification, so the certification should pass through to our solution.
Finally, we’re not doing this alone; we are most likely going to be doing our distribution through Seeed Studio, and they have done fulfilment of a half dozen Kickstarter campaigns without any of the issues that Pebble and Ouya faced. We asked them specifically about Germany and they said they’ve never had problems before.
Despite all of this it is still an issue that we’re looking into more deeply because nothing is certain until we actually ship a product. I think the best course of action will be to do a test shipment to Germany before we ship the whole run to make sure that it gets through without issue. Would anyone like to volunteer to be the recipient of said test shipment?
Hi Zach,
I notice that you have the Spark Core for pre-order at Seeed Studio. Will you be adding any other shields later like the RC Car, shield shield, battery shield, JTag shield and relay shield, or are these shields for kickstarter only ?
When shipping the core though seeed the customs may not know that is a kickstarter package as they ship other products to germany too. Maybe the customs problem can be avoided if it is packed as every other seeed parcel
Nevertheless, if customs send it to the Bundesnetzagentur, the core should meet the local guildlines to guarantee an flawless import. I don’t know if circuit boards have other rules than “consumer products”.
All i can tell from Pebble is that despite the CE certification the Bundesnetzagentur wanted to see a german manual and a german battery disposal note.
I volunteer for the test shipment, just send me an email with instructions.
Eventually we’d like to make everything available for sale that was included in the Kickstarter rewards, and right now on spark.io just about everything that was on the campaign is live for pre-order. When it comes to working with distributors like Seeed, though, there are more steps that we need to go through for all the accessories, so it’ll take a bit longer to get all of our goodies on other sites
I myself am experiencing huge problems with import to germany and was wandering if you even had any contact with the customs office or if it just went through and I am just the unlucky one…
