also, you can buy fpga h/w approx 100k gates etc. for < 1000$ (cheaper if you are student, and can get it via some univ. program). design, and simulation tools are also available for free (with periodic registrations etc.) the only (slight) pain point being that the s/w is generally windows only.
Unit costs matter in hardware though, so first thoughts should tend more toward markets and demographics -- "what problem should I solve... for how much?"
A new Ferrari (or a new Prius) would solve my getting-places problem better than the POS I drive now. I could buy a new Tesla Roadster, which would be better than either one, but that's even less affordable.
Of course, since a hardware startup requires some hefty NRI that you'll probably have to borrow from someone else, you might want to start by polishing up your resume.
I found that the most time consuming and expensive was turnaround time. If you have a bug in your software you fix it, compile, and go. 10 minutes of work. In hardware your turnaround time can be a week or more if you have to solder around on a breadboard to check changes or bugs.
For the record we managed to build a display device using RGB LED's, a FPGA to control them, a microcontroller to talk to a mobile phone unit that would be able to send and receive updates from a central server, and of course the server that controlled the displays that were scattered around the country in around 1½ years using roughly $150.000. It was an advertising network - take the display, plug it in to a power outlet, and it would wake up and receive news and ads from the central server over the mobile phone network.
Long story short, they built a device to monitor health, but realized, only after being harassed by clients, that the real market was weight loss. Like ebay, they literally had clients begging them for a product.
Personally, I'd love to work at a hardware startup :)
My last project was a computer-controlled kegerator (while I was in college, of course), called the kegbot:
Mike Wakerly deserves that credit: http://hoho.com/mike/
i got some PIC programmer and some pic chips and started doing some experiments ... but it seems like for me, a mac os x user, the AVR is a better option
im looking to buy some AVR "kits" from smileymicros.com very soon, as soon as i get some money ;) (i live in mexico so i have to pay more to get fedex)
im into programming music apps to make my own music, and i see a lot of potential to make hardware to control music/sound
hey, if you try the smilemicros kits, let me know ;)
ive heard a lot about the arduino, i think im gonna get one or build one
but i also want to be able to build my own circuits, to learn to program the microcontrollers, so i can get closer to the idea of designing the hardware for my software
I would really be weary of trying to start a hardware startup. You have to be a known expert, well connected, and have a good business team on your side.
Web startups have an insanely smaller barrier of entry. So if you want to start your own, I would definitely do a web startup. If you're just going to join one then I guess I would go with whichever idea I was more passionate about.
I'm not doing embedded gigs right now, but as I'm once again leaving my 9 to 5 job, I may be forced to sell myself soon :)
Be forewarned, though, that the person who takes this role will be working for equity/deferred compensation like everyone else, so it may not be the right gig for you if you need to replace a 9-to-5.
We bought a digital photo frame last week. Normally it sits horizontally. Horizontal photos fill the frame, but vertical photos are squeezed to fit. It detects when you turn it on its side, so that vertical photos fill the frame and horizontal photos are squeezed to fit.
Squeezed photos are too tiny, so I added horizontal-only and vertical-only Media RSS feeds to ourdoings.com, the world's best photo-sharing site. When we change the orientation of the frame we change the RSS feed.
This works great for my wife and me, but it takes some button pressing to change RSS feeds. Too much button pressing for non-technical people, I think.
If you hacked the firmware so that it switched back and forth automatically according to the orientation sensor, that would be really cool. People could set up a frame, send it to relatives as a gift, and the relatives could just plug it in and watch it go.
From "strings NK.bin|less", I learned that your frame was designed around an RMI (formerly AMD) Alchemy DB1200 reference board, running Windows CE 5.0 on an Au1200 CPU (MIPS32 architecture). More info about this stuff here: http://www.razamicroelectronics.com/products_alchemy/
IIRC, the Windows CE development kit contains tools to read filesystem dumps such as this one.
edit: there's some open source stuff in it but it looks legit (libFLAC, which is BSD-licensed and dual-license GPL stuff).
A more general approach to this problem would be to embed the sensor and a simple core like the ARM7 to handle the image rotation/scaling on a USB memory stick.
Then your product would work with any picture frame.
Aren't hackers just frustrated inventors anyway?
Yes.
>I think we have many software/web startups and not enough startups in hardware.
I think we have the right number. ;)