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Comment by iainmerrick | Hacker News Reader

More home gadgets should be like this. No real rocket science inside, just excellent design and good implementation. Optional smart Bluetooth stuff, completely usable just with minimal buttons and gestures. Doesn’t try to take over every household task, just tries to do one thing well.

Anybody could make products like this if they just took enough time and care over it. Hardly anybody ever does. (IKEA comes to mind as another good example, and maybe Philips’ Hue lights.)

[Edit to add: I have absolutely no connection with any products or companies I’ve mentioned, in case this comes across as marketing spam! I’m just constantly frustrated at crappy and/or invasive “smart home” devices, so it’s refreshing to see somebody take what seems to me exactly the correct approach, and apparently pull it off very well.]

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> Anybody could make products like this if they just took enough time and care

Name a resource more precious than time and one more scarce than care. What you're talking about is HARD to do.

Yeah, I guess it’s pretty much a “worse is better” thing. Worse products are faster to market and cheaper, so why waste time and money trying to do it “right”?

If your customer can't afford a product done "right", that is also an issue.

True, but we are also in a golden age for building things like that and accomplishing scale without a ton of money. It does take time and care, but it no longer takes a massive R&D budget.

"Care" also requires a ton of imagination to implement beautifully. Rare indeed.

>name a resource more precious than time

I'm so confused by this request.

It costs $99 dollars for a night light it better have a good design. I think I’ve spent no more than $20 on night lights that lasted a decade, maybe longer. I’m not sure I’d be able to read from it. The angle looks too low.

All that said I do want one but I won’t spend that much.

It's not really a night light. More like a before-bed and wake-up light.

While they don't publish the brightness, I asked Casper support, and they said it is about 375 lumens, which seems right anecdotally (I don't have an integrating sphere to verify). Note that you need to open the app and set "Overall Brightness" to max (just one time, not every time) to get that many lumens, otherwise, it's more like 300.

That's roughly equivalent to a 40 Watt light bulb. 100-150 lux at a usable distance (which is what this would give you) is a good setting for most people (from what I've seen). For my eyes (age 26) that's plenty to read with.

I’ll have to try it. My lamp is about a foot higher so the light can travel down to the paper while I’m sitting against my pillow. I’m not sure the globe would be able to do it without turning my book or body.

Nightlight ≠ reading lamp.

At 45 seconds you can see it’s being shown as a reading light too. Directly from Casper’s video on this page.

https://casper.com/glow-light/

> Anybody could make products like this if they just took enough time and care over it.

I think that's probably true, especially considering that the light has about all the hardware of a modern smartphone inside, minus the screen.

Yes, from this teardown, the hardware is nothing special at all. It’s much less than a modern smartphone, more like a Raspberry Pi.

The flex circuits are actually pretty high-tech and not cheap nor easy to do except for PCB manufacturers that are specialized in it. This hardware is pretty impressive in my view; it's not as impressive as a modern smartphone, but it's a lot more impressive than most other consumer-grade stuff I've seen, especially because of the PCBs used here.

The big differences between this and smartphones are that smartphones use a lot more chips, most of them very high-density BGAs, and much more powerful ones (esp. the CPU), and have to worry a lot more about heat dissipation. Smartphones probably have more layers in their PCBs too, and that's expensive as well. But the PCB assemblies here I see in this teardown are not simple or cheap. Most consumer electronics try hard to minimize the number of PCBs, and to avoid any complex shapes or cutouts, and definitely try to avoid flex connectors.

Flex circuits are not that hightech nor expensive. IIRC the per square inch price of single layer kapton flex PCB is comparable to your traditional four layer FR4 board.

On the other hand large amount of cheap(-ish, as it tends to include even high-end AV receivers) tries very hard to avoid FR4 and multilayer boards in general (apparently in high enough volume making four times larger board than required and the huge setup cost for THT assembly autamation makes economic sende)

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