If you're building a website or app, sorry this Ask HN isn't for you. This is for those makers who are creating physical things: headphones, medical devices, cars, furniture, etc...
My most interesting product converts position signals from old machine tools (e.g., large planers and mills built in the 70's, 80's and before) into signals that modern motor drives can read. It makes it much easier to retrofit old machinery with modern controls.
It was built at the request of a single customer and I did it mainly for fun, but over time it's opened my eyes to the market for tools to retrofit and modernize old equipment. They're still actively buying these from me, but I know there has to be a larger market.
Product #2 is still being developed: a generic "leveling module." Basically it's a motor controller designed to keep the load level in one axis.
For the last 15 years or so I've also been making modules take a pulse input at one end, and send an accumulated count out the other end over an RS232 serial interface. I don't sell a lot of them, but the surprising thing is that demand hasn't dropped off over all this time. Could probably sell more, but it's really not interesting enough to put a lot of marketing effort into. The fun part is all the customizations I'm asked to do.
Are you removing old motor drives from machines and installing new drives to extend life? There is certainly a larger market. I'm in Norfolk, VA and there are machine shops all over the place. I'd love to hear more from you.
They realized that if they had hardware to read the original position indication, do some DSP and convert to something the new drives could handle, it would simplify everything. That's where I came in.
It's been working out pretty well for everyone concerned so far and I'm now working on version 3 of the product!
I often say we're actually building three products, ML, hardware and software. It is pretty challenging but a lot of fun, and very rewarding.
[0] - https://stenon.io/en/
Ideas: Don't just target industrial agriculture, consider the residential and commercial garden and surveyor markets. For inspiration or allies, look at the mining industry's established ecosystem of prospecting and sampling related service and software companies. They could also be customers: with open cut mines, they often have to do site remediation, eventually, and it's well funded.
This brings me around 500 euros per month. Recently the sales of Marcus Aurelius took off nicely, so I'm seriously thinking about expanding this business by making busts of more famous philosophers and leaders. I'm in the process of adding mini concrete busts of Alan Turing, Steve Jobs, Slavoj Žižek, Nikola Tesla, Plato, Aristotle, Jordan Peterson and more.
If anyone is interested in how I these are made (3d printing, molding, concrete pouring), please check here: https://twitter.com/matixmatix/status/1243116129289146368
We are moving the operation out of downtown Portland OR, but this virus will slow down our opening.
There’s a surprising number of ways to apply technology to bread baking. Inventory management, formula calculation, delivery planning, etc. There’s also the problem of trying to optimize the production schedule , i.e. when to mix, how long to rise, when to shape, and when to bake, across your entire menu with orders changing day to day.
Yup! For example, here's an old press release from a vendor of combinatorial optimisation software (LocalSolver) -- the type of software that you might use to optimise Operations Research type problems: inventory management, supply chain, planning, routing, scheduling -- about a successful integration and deployment of their product to cost-optimise a large Japanese bakery's supply chain decisions:
> [Pasco Shikishima Corporation]'s supply chain involves 15 factories in Japan, each one with several production lines, and more than 100 distribution centers. Pasco's catalog contains more than 1,000 products. 900,000 orders have to be executed each day in Pasco's factories. For each order, Pasco has to decide where and when to produce it. Moreover, Pasco has to decide where to source raw materials and which routes to deliver distribution centers. The goal is to minimize production and distribution costs over several days of horizon, while respecting production and distribution capacities.
> Here is the scale of a LocalSolver instance solved by Pasco to plan the next 3 days: 32,670,717 expressions (that is, intermediate variables) including 8,307,431 binary decisions, 991,251 constraints, 16 lexicographic-ordered objectives. This model was solved in 3 minutes of running time on a modern but standard server, including input and output processing times.
-- https://www.localsolver.com/news.html?id=70
(& apologies for dragging the conversation back towards software, but there's some challenging mathematical & computational problems involved in figuring out how to manufacture & distribute physical products efficiently)
The driver inputs are read and fed into the game engine which outputs the rendered video to the vehicle LCD's. The output from the game engine is also used to control the 6-DOF motion platform to recreate the physical motion one experiences while driving.
As a research engineer, I get pulled to work more on "development" projects close to or with industry. Grad students get the more early phase research stuff.
I'm currently working on a contract for a large aerospace company, which involves a new kind of thrust-generating machine. I'm solely responsible for designing and building a prototype and test bench as well as doing the experimental work when that is done.
It's diverse and rewarding work, but it gets a bit lonely sometimes compared to working in teams with 10s of engineers and techs in a large multinational corp. It's still the most enjoyable job I've held so far.
Designed for Nordic climates but insulates just as well if it's warm outside :)
The initial target was a modern starter house pattern, that could be expanded as the family grew, then split for renting out parts when the owners got old. It had to be cheaper, environmentally friendly, and healthier to live in.
As a bonus it has excellent fire resistance, and is very quiet.
It's fun to work with this kind of problem. Quite far from my normal projects. But holy hell, I didn't realise how truly broken the bureaucracy around construction is in many regions.
Now, I don't treat these projects as startups, but solely to share the joy of building, learning and teaching.
Recently, I built a project called Wise Charlie which is a compact list of mental models in a deck of cards form. https://www.wisecharlie.com/
Our first product (launched in December 2019) is an antibacterial/antifungal 2-sided bath towel designed to separate natural bacteria from exposure to your face.
Several medical research studies show we spread pathogenic bacteria and fecal matter to our face when we reuse a bath towel.
Our first product helps reduce natural pathogenic bacteria exposure: https://halfff.com
I’m part of https://www.dwarvin.com that provide lighting solutions to model railways. Its a small family business and I help out with online side of things. Recently was ask to help out with to build a programmable lighting system and am having tons of fun, brings me back to my embedded systems class during my CS degree time.
We were originally pure software people, so it's been fun and challenging to explore the hardware space. I've found it to be a lot like software development but with much much longer "compile times" aka manufacturing.
[0] - https://lunadisplay.com
Once I'm done raising this round (great timing, I know) we'll start deploying our mobile sensors that let us create ad-hoc BLE networks that can be deployed dynamically and find missing pets very quickly without requiring a GPS.
[0] - https://gethuan.com/
Actually, a network of those plus: a factory to build them; operations centers to supply them; and a logistics network to resupply, maintain, and repair them.
Now 4 years in, we have a factory, we're currently finalizing for mass production, we own our own production equipment, we are way below budget per unit and we're funded.
My background is actually entirely software, so this is my first physical product. It’s been both challenging and a ton of fun!
I wrote a blog post about the process here:
3d Digital design, CNC manufacturing with laser and router machines, and we still depend on a lot of skilled and talented people on the bench.
So much of my time in software project management has been an asset here.