Well done on shipping. Reading this gave me PTSD of shipping our first hardware product at a similar scale. It was a tough experience but you'll have learned a huge amount and be much better equipped for the second time (if you choose to keep going). I found the biggest takeaway is planning for things to go wrong in advance and building enough slack into the process so that you can accommodate some setbacks.
GT Flexa was super fun to work with. The numerals on Altar I are, as you can imagine, the widest and thinnest that Flexa would go! I also added a custom Egyptian "I", rather than the default "I" since it reads less like a lowercase "L".
As @yeutterg says below it is possible to self certify CE.
For prototyping the body, I initially 3d printed it, then moved to 1 off cnc milling. For this I mostly used Geomiq (geomiq.com), which farms it out to various countries (mostly china from what I can tell), then they make it and send it to you. I plan to have the case manufactured in the UK — I found contacts for this because I happen to work in the automotive industry in the UK currently. The most difficult part of the case will be anodising which will require a lot of trial and error.
For the plastics, they are all 3d printed for prototyping, and will be injection moulded in the UK for production.
PCBs are printed in China for prototyping. Not sure where the production PCBs will come from yet.
That's great! Thanks for the info, Geomiq looks brilliant.
If you could go into more detail on the CE self certification that would be awesome. How did you figure out what testing you need to perform on the product to complete the self certification? The biggest source of confusion for me is this aspect of it. Sure I can self certify that all is good, but how can I be certain that I am not missing something that will get me into legal trouble?
For my own project the biggest source of compliance is related to the ESP-32 that I am using (because of the WiFi/Bluetooth radio). Of course the boards I get from Amazon and Alibaba all have CE written on them, but how can I trust that? I read that the seller has to give CE certificates but they always seem to have a serial number that appears fake (there was some database that you can look them up in and they always fail to show up). I also read that putting together components that are all CE does not mean that the full product can be considered compliant. So in general it seems like a massive undertaking.
Some wifi/ble modules come pre-certified. The holyiot 18010 (nRF52840) on the prototype comes with FCC/RoHS certs from the factory, so at least the Bluetooth part is "guaranteed" to be conform, and everything else is so simple, it won't cause any relevant EMI either way (esp. not inside a metal shell).
In theory the board works with Linux, but it has not actually been tested. If it is tested with Linux and is confirmed working, I will specify that in the specs.
