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Comment by vsskanth | Hacker News Reader

I know a niche in hardware, encountered while doing R&D for an F500.

High sample rate (20 Hz min.) sensor telemetry (9 DOF IMU + GPS) over cellular network, as a single encapsulated unit with built in antenna and a battery to handle power interruptions.

Data needs to go a remote server and devices should be remotely manageable if deployed as a fleet.

I searched quite a bit and eventually ended up using a bunch of Samsung Galaxy phones in a hard case, with a datalogging app and an automation that syncs log files to Dropbox. Devices were managed over TeamViewer.

There are some small players in this field each satisfying 70% of these requirements and they're printing money.

All the pieces are out there. Just need someone to make a product so enterprises can throw money at them.

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I like your minimalist solution. Fleet tracking / management seems like a commodity business with a lot of players in it. How do you differentiate and win here?

Fleet management solutions are built for EDL requirements. They have event based logging and won't log data at high sample rates and don't send it to a server of your choice because they want you to use their subscription based dashboard.

Curious which applications require logging at high sample rates vs. doing event-based?

From my narrow experience as an R&D engineer in the auto sector:

You need to understand the duty cycle of the platform you're developing for (ex. Tires for a vehicle). A garbage truck is going to have a different loading cycle from an EV or a CAT morning truck. If you know the right conditions your product will fail on durability.

Fleets are ok with collecting this data for R&D as long as you don't bother them with extra work and give them useful analytics. Data collection devices need to be easy to install, collect for a few weeks and remove.

You can also use this as an R&D platform to develop IoT data-enabled products like predictive maintenance, route analytics, insurance and warranty claims etc. ML has a lot of potential here but you need to collect data.

Eventually when you have an IoT product you can get a vendor to make an optimized ASIC to collect and process exactly what signals you want.

There are many more applications in the auto industry for these kind of niche products.

Vehicle crash analysis for one.

There's an existing product called the SlamStick that's used to record high-shock/high-vibration environments. They released a paper on using one to find the source of a troubling vibration in a Navy helicopter. I came across them when doing research for a customer in the Vehicle Dynamics space.

It's one of those little niches that no one knows about and seems to support quite a few small companies.

Do you have more information about the industry that would use this?

Automotive. See my other responses in this thread.

i'm in automotive, and we've looked into this a few times for commercial fleet telemetry. It's just impossible to beat the pricing of cheap mobile phones when they have the volumes.

Yeah pricing really isn't the issue here. We're talking enterprise. The market rate for a data logging device that does something close to this Galaxy mobile is $750-$1000.

Could you elaborate? What are these used for?

R&D work mainly.

To understand the duty cycle of your products (let's say a tire) in the field.

To collect data to train ML models or to develop algorithms.

Use as a prototyping platform for IoT products.

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