Whatever happened to Underwriters Laboratory (UL) approval, as well as the Good Housekeeping seal? I remember these labels on nearly all appliances years ago.
Haven't really thought about it until reading Ron's experience.
Anymore I think those specs have been watered down. Way too many items carry the UL Listed versus UL Approved. Listed means little in the way of meeting specifics. It means nothing more than an application submitted to UL.... not that the item actually underwent testing and approval. The items conform to very basic specs..... like making sure an AC line cord has insulation around the copper wires!
This requires a little reading but it is interesting. The following is a company, a fairly large company we were doing business with:
**broken link removed**
They were expected to and claimed they were in absolute compliance to policy and procedural methods. However we seemed to be having problems with their plating process. The plating seemed to blister and just wasn't right. Just something about it wasn't right.
Now one way we test a plating process is have the vendor plate what we call a coupon. Just a metal tab and they plate it. Following plating some tabs the tabs are bent and the plating is observed for peeling and cracking. These guys always had perfect coupons. Matter of fact they were too perfect. The bastards were bending the coupons and then plating them. Pretty smart huh?
Unfortunately things went amock for them:
**broken link removed**
At least two are still serving time in a federal prison. Fraud in doing work critical to the safe operation of nuclear reactors on US war ships is really frowned upon. The company is still in business after a 1.5 Million USD fine. Funny is their refrences to nuclear grade work in their website. What a joke!
here's another one, cheap ebay wii nunchuck(that i bought to play with the axelarometer): **broken link removed**
the green shiny areas are where it's connecting
so basically, whenever i connect my "arduino" to it, the i2c bus fails every pin is basically shorting with a resistance of 2Kohm...
(i tryed using a ds1307 i2c RTC to double check, there's dafinitely something wrong in that wiring...)
I'm pretty disappointed about this, i wont return it because the shipping to hong kong is more expensive than the actual thing.
sigh