You get into a lot of regulations issues if you want to sell and market it as “fun gadget”. Then you actually have to follow all the regulations and make sure it doesn’t exceed all the duty cycles, output power etc. So, I would advocate highly against it. I don’t want to deal with the legal consequences and I guess you don’t want to as well. The device should only be appealing to a certain audience. At least developer with some microcontroller knowledge. If you want to go the fun route, remove the radio and get it certified. Still kind of expensive, but less expensive than with radio. You can still make the tutorials etc. easy to follow for a dev kit. So that potentially another audience it able to follow it. But actively advertising it as “fun gadget” can be dangerous.
Funny that you bring this topic up. I started to design a devkit for Web of Things. Still a long term project, since the implementation is still in progress and there are some open questions. So, it would be great to have a devkit. From my perspective it pretty much needs what @chrysn mentioned. RGB LED is not very important to me. But they don’t really add much costs to it, so fine for me. 802.15.4 is not a must for me, BLE on the other hand is. On board storage is pretty much a must for me though. I eventually want to cache the Web of Things TD. 8/16MB flash storage also isn’t that expensive. (Okay, due to the shortage it is)
But actively advertising it as “fun gadget” can be dangerous.
I think that the widespread route here is to go for a “kit” – even if we select and equip it to be a toy, it’ll be a toy for people who take responsibility for their own firmware. (There is an appeal to the “make it a full thing and do all the CE stuff”, as it might serve as a scaffolding to follow for other open hardware projects, but it’ll be a lot of complexity, even if we use a precertified radio module like Würth’s “proteus” nrf52840).
Even when it’s sold as a kit, I think that many uses might still be in at least some legal gray area – the relevant frequencies being ISM just means that CE conforming producers can build things for that band without the need for the user to obtain a shard of the band, doesn’t mean that everyone may build or assemble their own devices (that’s AIU reserved for people with an appropriate business license, and for amateur radio). But at least it’s not the manufacturer’s responsibility any more, and I don’t have any indication that people ever got into trouble for using radio devkits.
I also tend to think this would be nice. Maybe a little bit “less end” product could be feasible, such as the Ruuvitag. That one is just a tiny multipurpose board with BLE + some sensors.
802.15.4 is not a must for me, BLE on the other hand
The transceiver is the same. We could just pick a radio that supports both.
It’s now part of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard 
After looking up some rules I found the following:
- Any electronics produced, sold or distributed will need certification (dev kit or not)
- Radio or not, if the device runs more than a few kHz it needs certification
- There are some exceptions for hobbyists with less than 5 devices
- There are no real useful exemptions for kits or so
It seems CE can be self declared but FCC can’t… Looking into this I am getting a bit concerned with the consequences and requirements of even starting this. This looks like it may be a bit more expensive than I have anticipated. We may require an already certified radio (or no radio) since intentional transmitters certification is pretty expensive.
I would like to point out again that we have lots of resources available within our group to do some pre certification and self declaration stuff, but I don’t know if that will be enough.
Maybe it would be worth investing more time into exemption rules, like the hobbyist one.
I know about the EU situation. Seems like it’s very similar in the USA. The EU makes an exception since 2014 in EN 61000-6-xx. Don’t ask me about the paragraph. ^^ That is why they always add this " ENGINEERING DEVELOPMENT, DEMONSTRATION OR EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY" blabla disclaimer. See Evaluation Board/Kit Important Notice
As long as you don’t advertise it as educational board, fun board etc. you are fine. And of course you need that disclaimer.
I still think that is a nice project. Something I could need. Having nice tutorials for that board, great support in RIOT. That sounds great. Especially, if that is going to be a RISC-V MCU 
If you want to do a proper CE, FCC certification and market is more towards fun projects. How about having a crowdfunding for it? So, you do all of your testing before the certification and make sure that the costs are down to a minimum for the certification. And the money gets collected via a crowdfunding campaign. When the Web of Things implementation is done, I am also happy to market it for Web of Things compatibility. I can try getting some of the companies in the W3C on board for using and market it a bit. That’s maybe they could be interested in.
If we want to stick with the “geocaching” (a demonstration development and evaluation geocache, obviously), then the UWB ranging that RIOT-FP has would be super cool to have in there.
(And then caches can be really hidden, like dug in the ground).
It’s not “in” RIOT-fp, it’s a RIOT pkg for a while now here is an examples. In RIOT-fp we just had an application to make use of this library, so its an option but its only works on dw1000 uwb chips.
Term start slowed me down with Riot-reading - This is a SUPER idea! we have someone developing a simple samr30 board - our aim was simple USB flashing and cheap to reproduce as a demo-board for Riot… But I can imagine it is tough to choose what hardware to base something on…
@MrKevinWeiss I can help with PMIC selection and also Trace Antenna design or ceramic antenna selection 
. I can also buy some and distribute them in India via a small satellite event
Mhmm, I find geocaching very hard to sell. I just had an idea for a WoT device you can connect to the HDMI of a TV/monitor. Have a nice API to display pictures and text. Or maybe even have retro games on it. Something like that. I would like to have more broader, less geeky, use-cases. Use-cases you can catch also web-developers with. The broader maker audience.
In order to start moving forward we should select an idea of what the board will accomplish (target application). Keep in mind, the important thing is the process of getting to the end product rather than the product itself.
- musical keyboard
- border router
- digital geocache
0 voters
Devices of that league barely fall into the constraints where RIOT shines. (In particular, I’d guess that any chip that can drive HDMI and is not an FPGA is probably beefy enough to run Linux on).
The areas where I see a RIOT device interact with a games or home media are more on the tangible side (“We build a minimal musical keyboard … and hey, with the proper firmware you can use it as a Bluetooth game controller!”) or on the physical-interface side (“it’s a CEC adapter, but it can’t just do USB, you can now control your TV remotely over the network, or use your TV remote as a keyboard with the builtin IR transceiver”).
(It’d be really neat if a RIOT device could work as a USB-or-BLE sound card and even output audio through HDMI, but I doubt this will come on small hardware).
After a discussion in the weekly coordination meeting, we concluded that we should make low-power a point of this board.
The badge similar to the one from the CCC was also suggested.
Though the border router is popular, I don’t think it will show off the low power modes of RIOT and, as an individual piece of hardware, does not do much (ie, one would need an edge device to make it interesting).
I think things can be iterated much quicker if we just had a virtual meeting to decide and toss around ideas.
I would propose a quick meeting 2021-10-25T08:00:00Z → 2021-10-25T08:30:00Z on my favorite jitsi channel
We can always iterate but it would be nice to get started on something.
How about a badge that can speak IPv6 or CoAP over BTLE to a phone? So that one can update the badge using one’s phone.
Perhaps the badge could also (optionally) exchange info with other badges. Does that lead to eventually doing ungrounded-RPL? Maybe in software version 4.0.
There is no obvious timezone in the display, but when I quote it to ask… it says: date=2021-10-25 time=10:00:00 timezone=“Europe/Berlin”
That’s Monday. I’ll try to be there.
I thought it would resolve for everyone’s own timezone… or at least have a tooltip type thing. I will clarify next time.
Are there any notes of the meeting?
Nobody showed up… But we had a chat on the matrix channel and are moving forward!