Compliance
Country of origin and the bill of materials
The claim that matters is not where a drone was assembled. It is where each part in it came from.
Why it comes up
Why anyone is asking
A customer who has to certify what they bought needs the answer down to the component, and needs it again every time a line on the bill of materials changes. Left until the end of a program it is archaeology; kept as the design goes, it is a column in a table.
What we do about it
- Track country of origin on the bill of materials from the first build, not at the end
- Collect written attestations from suppliers rather than repeating their marketing
- Record the evidence with the part, so a later substitution shows up as a gap
- Re-check the list when a supplier changes a part number under the same name
This describes how we work. It is not legal advice, and what a rule requires of you depends on your customer and your contract.
What this covers in the package
- BOM country-of-origin tracking
- Supplier-attestation checklist
- Approved vendor list
The other subjects
What NDAA compliance means for a build
A drone is not compliant because a supplier says so. It is compliant because what is inside it, and who built it, can be shown.
What an FCC certification plan covers
A commercial product that transmits generally has to be authorized before it can be marketed, and that is a hardware decision, not a late one.
SBOM, secure boot and signed updates
A software bill of materials is a list of what is inside the software, and it is becoming as ordinary a request as the hardware one.