I have a customer who wants a USB-powered battery charger designed, with certification -n- all. I figure the certification part will be harder than the charger part, so I have to give it a pass.
Anyone do that and have spare cycles, or know someone? He wants someone with a track record, or I'd talk him into using me!
-- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com
Yes, i've done USB charger designs, but certifications are usually done by the manufacturer. Cert. means every single aspect of productions needed to be involved. I can certainly get your customer linked to the right people , if they volume is high enough. I would have to pass if they when certifi cation design for a few hundreds or thousands pcs (it happened).
I'm not sure what he's got in mind -- his current product is certainly not high volume.
Someone who could hand-hold him through the cert process would probably be enough.
-- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com
What certs? UL/CSA/CE? FCC?
A test lab will do those, for a moderate pile of money.
Is there a USB certification standard?
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation
You have to pass their compatibility tests if you want to use their logos & such. I'm not sure whether you can even use "USB", but I suspect by now that you can if you use the right wording.
-- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com
You can use something like the FTDI chips and (maybe) inherit the certs.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
I think its $3K just for the PID and VID alone.
Cheers
I think the minimum is to get the drivers signed if for windoze. Otherwise it' can be al PITA to install the drivers, especially in windows 8
Actually, it's mainly the .inf file that tells the system what to install and any additional driver.sys (etc) files that may go along in addition to the drivers that already come with windows.
This supposedly costs a few hundred dollars and is good for a year or two (or 3 ?).
We are looking into this aspect now.
boB
They have upped it to $5K. We finally got into doing enough USB devices that I decided to pop out the $2K they were asking for a VID (you make up the PID yourself), and wouldn't you know it, they had increased the price to $5K just in time for me to give them some money. That's my lot. Naturally, they want you to sign on for the $4K a year subscription that gets you logo use and so on.
And that nicely sums up the real motivation for removing the ever useful parallel and serial ports on our computers.
Jeroen Belleman
I wonder if you go with the PID from microchip ( if they still offer it) that you can get a cert from usb.org with it. Same for FTDI.
Cheers
We've done USB boxes with both the FTDI chips and using the USB hardware inside an NXP uP. We use their VIDs. Seems to work fine.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
I don't know. I'm pretty sure Microchip will still give you a PID, upon request, but I don't know how that works with the USB.org folks.
I am pretty sure you cannot. You need unique UID for cert.
Yes, for development.
No.
But you can't certify the box without your own VID. Perhaps you can pay FTDI to do it for you, but you can't do it using their VID.
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