Y Combinator Challenge #27 - Hardware/software hybrids

1. Automated pet feeders: Add a scale under the food bowl and a scale where your cat/small dog sits to eat, throw in a webcam (and a mic to hear the crunchy sounds) and an embedded board to control it all and dish out the right amount of food and find a wealthy pet crazy audience who wants to see a graph of their pet's weight/consumption over time.

Have the 'community' compare breeds eating habits + figure out different eating patterns + types of food.

The deluxe model could have a speaker so you can voip to your pet loving sounds to help them digest. Partner with some of the GPS collars (and collars with accelerometers to figure out overall activity) for a full online profile of your furry obsession.

2. Bird feeders: Capture some really closeup pictures of birds gorging themselves on your delectable food. Have a solar panel on the top + an embedded wifi board that can email pictures of cute birds eating their food to the customer.

Do it high res enough to know if a bird comes back the next spring. Email when food get's low. Create a community that shares the pictures + might even track a bird or two once they know that the reflective solar panel equals a great meal.

Have a deluxe model that weighs the bird as it stands on the perch. Add a mic to record their gossip. Give them a facebook page.

Find rich bird crazy people to pay $2k for it.

3. Networked scale: Much like the pet concept, this would be a $500 scale that, barring dropping 20 pounds overnight, can detect you + update you on your health. It can tie into a weight watchers site, as well as play shower music.

You get a weekly email of a graph of your weight with motivational tools.

I'm really digging that iBear thing. Obviously, it needs to be ironed out a bit, but I think it has tremendous potential.

i wanted to play with microcontroller for drip irrigation, pumps, solar powered etc

Simpler, natural solution exists for plant+fert+pesticide: wet field: a combo of rice+azolla+sheep+duck+fish dry field: a combo of rice+white clover

Similarly, i wanted to play with microcontrolled fish-keeping, pump, filter, aerator, heater, fertilizer ... fancy stuff

Simpler, no-tech natural solution again exists: just use soil+aqua plant+sunlight

Really, nature amazes me to no end, to the point that i hate my engineering knowledge ... i truly concern that my creation will be inferior to nature

For reference, the natural books: one straw revolution: masanobu fukuoka the power of duck: takao furuno ecology of the planted aquarium:diana walstad

The iBear thing is stupid and kind of creepy.

The internet controlled switch is a good idea. It exists, of course, but most examples are expensive and aimed at datacenter type applications. There is also the X10 devices.

I think that most startup oriented entrepreneurs are overly focused on web apps right now. I think people overestimate the costs and complexity of hardware, and even desktop software.