Ask HN: Any hardware startups here? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

509 pointsguzik700 comments

Amidst the sea of software startups, I'm keen to learn who in our community is braving the often-quoted "hardware is hard" mantra. Whether you're working on IoT, robotics, consumer electronics, or something completely off the wall, please feel free to share below.

Remember, no venture is too small or niche! It's the passion and innovation that counts.

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We are building the world's highest temperature heat pump. It can reach 1000℉, when other commercial heat pumps usually reach a maximum of 320 ℉.

It is a big deal because factories have to rely on polluting natural gas to produce their process heat.

We estimate that it represents 3% of the world’s annual CO2 emissions and a $10B+ annual market opportunity.

We are currently building a 5kW prototype at 480℉/250C to cook french fries for McCain (world's largest manufacturer of frozen potato products), our industrial partner for the first pilot.

If you would like to support our decarbonization efforts, feel free to email us on contact@airthium.com or to invest in our crowdfunding! https://wefunder.com/airthium

What is the COP of a heat pump operating against this temperature gradient?

Quoting from their linked website:

> Our heat pump can generate up to 3 times as much heat as a resistor, using the same amount of electricity.

Though it doesn't mention the temperature at which this is achieved, only that the range is from 160 to 550°C.

we published a calculator if you would like to dig deeper! https://airthium.github.io/airthium.com-calculator/

The COP gets lower as the temperature difference increases as you can expect.

For those, like me, who didn't know this term:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance

> The coefficient of performance or COP (sometimes CP or CoP) of a heat pump, refrigerator or air conditioning system is a ratio of useful heating or cooling provided to work (energy) required.[1][2] Higher COPs equate to higher efficiency, lower energy (power) consumption and thus lower operating costs.

That 'up to 3 times' is a very generic sounding Carnot cycle number. It's about the upper limit for heat pump performance, so it's not a very meaningful number IMO.

the maximum is given by the carnot cycle, which has COP=T_high/(T_high-T_cold) so from room temp 25°C to 250°C it is 2.3, but this is the theoretical limit

Which is why for some pool heat pumps you get claimed numbers of around 9, with the fine-print that the air temperature has to be higher than the water temperature.

At 1000℉ (811K) the maximum achievable COP against an ambiental (300K) source is about 1.6, limited by the second principle of thermodynamics.

And that's the absolute theoretical maximum, you would be happy to breakeven in practice. Unless you have access to waste turbine exhaust, geothermal water, solar collectors or something along those lines, I don't see any practical application where the marginal energy savings would recover the capital costs of the pump at 1000F.

But hey, they have software modeling and venture financiers, so I'm sure they are not overselling it and it's all excellent and double plus innovative.

You are correct, even though your last sentence wasnt necessary...

Please consider a use case where an industrial user install a thermal storage like this one https://www.kyotogroup.no/technology

They may need CO2 free process heat at 400 ℉, and use a thermal storage at 800 or 1000℉.

Our heat engine can pump more heat than resistive heating (heat pump mode) during charge. During discharge, it can convert heat to electricity from 1000F to 400F, and use that electricity to power a heat pump (and produce more heat). We can "magnify" the storage both ways.

We don't need to go to 1000F soon, there are so many applications we can decarbonize along the way. We could lower the temperature and do cooling+heating at the same time for example.

Those chips should come in special packaging saying they're eco friendly

plastic packaging, of course

Or, serious suggestion, dehydrated potato skin, held together with starch. Fun gimmick anyway.

Plastic packaging is more eco-friendly than any alternative. Lightweight, carbon sink, and as long as it's not dumped in the ocean, has a very small and environmentally friendly waste footprint.

The dumping in the ocean part is an issue in countries with under-developed waste management infrastructure, not something inherent to plastics.

Are the plastics in your blood responsible for the content of this post?

I think there may be an angle here, but it’s distracting to so drastically minimize the environmental impacts

I don't see how glass, steel, or paper packaging would be superior. Paper is far more carbon intensive to produce (think an order of magnitude), and for food products it must be treated in such a way that it is not perfectly biodegradable wood pulp, but rather lined with plastic or plastic derivatives. It also doesn't work very well for frozen foods.

Glass is extremely carbon intensive to produce, and it weighs an enormous amount meaning a greater carbon footprint to ship products from factory to table. Not to mention it is impractical for goods like freeze dried potatoes mentioned above.

Steel cans and other metal packaging is lighter than glass, but also heavy, and does not lend itself very well to frozen foods, but mainly to preservatives. It is also carbon intensive to produce and lined with plastic. Glass and steel are recyclable, but this is carbon intensive and only works when people are educated enough to recycle and then the infrastructure exists in the first place.

To cap this off, microplastics are not yet even proven to be harmful. The scientific literature is "no" at best, and "inconclusive" at worst. It is not some proven hyper-carcinogen that many laypeople get the impression it is.

I think a lot of people have some sort of pavlovian response to the word plastic done by 25 years of fair and unfair media coverage, without thinking about actual plausible alternatives to it.

"Plastic is bad, we should use X" is an interesting comment worth exploring.

"Plastic is bad" is a statement. Yes, everything in the world has pros and cons, but stating cons in a vacuum isn't insightful.

The issue is plastic doesn’t reasonably biodegrade when left alone and doesn’t recycle well. We can make transport use cleaner energy, but we seemingly can’t make plastic meaningfully more disposable/reusable.

Plastic does take a long time to decompose, but to the extent this is actually a major issue isn't clear to me. A plastic bag takes 20-40 years to decompose per the BBC. That landfill you use will be there long after we're dead, certainly more than 20-40 years.

The main issue is whether it makes it to the landfill in the first place, but this isn't particular to plastic. .

Quite a lot of the ocean plastic is either fishing gear or dumped from ships, and much of the rest is indeed from countries with a culture of littering in the river and no public waste disposal infrastructure to counter that.

ball grid array perhaps has the right thermal properties

started reading here... it took me a while to figure out where the "chips" where coming from :-D

I agree! I would love to see the carbon intensity of each product I buy or some kind of scale from A to F.

This is really cool. Can you talk about some interesting challenges/problems you encountered?

We started in 2016 with just an idea, and we probably encountered every problem you can think of !

- hard to raise funds for large deeptech projects (thank you YC and Wefunder for unlocking that one!)

- a corrosion issue in 2019 that nearly killed us (we found a way around it after months of brainstorming and completely got rid of corrosion issues)

- we had to build our own physics algorithm for very specific problems, and ended up selling the software we use internally to DENSO (a large japanese company) which funded the development. See https://tanatloc.com

- tackling a market that doesnt exist yet with a seasonal energy storage solution (a change of engine architecture allowed us to use the same engine but for industrial heat pumps, an existing market much easier to tackle)

- finding the right industrial space,

and so on :)

> ... we had to build our own physics algorithm for very specific problems, and ended up selling the software ...

Like a simulation algorithm? Can you elaborate on what kind of algo and the problem it solved?

I can't go into details for confidentiality reasons but we published a paper last December on one of the simulation models : https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-12019-0_...

I'm very interested in anything else you can share about the corrosion problem you solved. Wet, hot ammonia must be awful.

How did you get into conversation with DENSO? Channels through YCombinator or investors?

at a mathematical conference :)

On the frontpage right now is a video about water desalination: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36602909

It got me wondering, would your heat pump be a solution to improve the efficiency of those plants?

This sounds very cool. Wait, no, hot.

In a factory setting, there is a bunch of heat wasted in other processes, e.g. waste heat from machines. Is this heat collected and fed into the air source?

Stirling engines like ours can go at cryogenic temperatures too :) They are used to reliquify natural gas at LNG terminals, but we decided to focus on industrial heat for now.

You are correct. In our case, we can go from ambient air to the desired process temperature, but the coefficient of performance will be much better if we have access to a waste heat source (the higher temperature the better).

I’m having a hard time understanding the seasonal energy storage component. Can you dive into this a bit more? I wasn’t able to find much on your website.

I work in the energy industry and this is one of the largest issues that utilities (and plenty of others) face (and even go as far as installing thermostats that they can control in their customers’ homes).

I’m wondering if there’s anything that can be done to advance the 2030 timeline? Both from an investor and potential customer perspective, that’s a lengthy timeline for such an interesting value prop.

We are building more than a heat pump, it is a novel stirling architecture, that is, a machine that converts electricity to heat, and heat to electricity.

The idea is summarized on this picture https://imgur.com/a/f5T1NYi and is as follow: - solar/wind energy would be converted to heat using our engine and stored into a thermal storage unit (molten salts or sand). This would provide up to 30-40 hours of energy for day-to-day storage. - all year long, the unused energy is converted on-site to green ammonia (with H2 electrolyzers and a small haber-bosch plant) and stored in liquid form at -30C. The ammonia is then burned via a low NOx external burner, something other ammonia engines/turbines can't do well yet without expensive filters, and the combustion heat is turned to electricity with our engine.

This form of storage is much cheaper than storing hydrogen above ground. It competes with H2 storage in under-ground salt caverns without the geographical limitation. The efficiency is far from exceptional, but it is CO2 free and is only used as a "joker" a few days per year.

The whole system is a functional replacement for a natural gas fired power plant.

A company like Form Energy started in 2017, raised hundreds of millions and I think their first pilot is coming next year. Cash is key but not always the issue, I am glad they are helping storage companies with initiatives like the Long Duration Energy Storage group and all their lobbying efforts

This all sounds excellent, but I'm wincing at how many different pieces there are that are either (a) semi-unproven or (b) have a really high capital cost to value ratio. And they all have to work for the business to work.

> H2 electrolyzers

Do you have a platinum-free solution for this?

> small haber-bosch plant

Is this a thing already? Wouldn't this be more directly marketable into the fertilizer industry, which needs fewer of the rest of the pieces?

> is only used as a "joker" a few days per year

This is very bad for capital efficiency, sadly.

why not rely on the grid those few days in a year? I kind of get self sufficiency is the goal, eventually, but for now sounds cheaper to go gradually?

My dude, never has this image been more relevant https://datavizblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/map-full-siz...

this sounds like an interesting product and the team clearly has impressive credentials.

I am very sceptical of crowd funding however, I think these are largely terrible investments for consumers while explicitly targeting people who are not accredited investors.

what made you go that route instead of pursuing VC funding?

It is a combination of things. We hesitated a lot to do a crowdfunding but : - a corrosion issue nearly killed us and we had to "reboot"

- our team was in full lockdown in France for a while and we could not prototype as easily

- in 2021 we were still focused on seasonal energy storage, a very capital intensive endeavour, a market not ready and a very risky project.

- the rules for crowdfunding changed in 2021 and the use of SPV (special purpose vehicles) made it possible to raise big + have one line on the cap table.

We had to derisk the project further to be able to attract VC funding (patent, prototype, LOIs, financial model, etc.) and we ultimately followed the advice from another YC founder and friend who went the crowdfunding route with success. A lot of crowdfunding projects look like outright scams and probably are... but I feel that the SEC did a good job protecting the public. You cannot invest more than a certain amount if you are not accredited for example. Things are certainly not perfect, and getting better year after year.

This is fascinating; I love hear pumps! Can you comment on why this might not have been done before? Maybe new materials make it possible, or it’s marginally more expensive but can be done with clean energy, which people have a premium on now?

Good question! I would say advances in numerical simulations, cheap renewable energy, and a lot of luck/perseverance (we would not have found this technology without spending 3 years on the first idea that didn't work out)

We're building a closed loop artificial pancreas (think dialysis but for blood sugar) for hospital use -- the first of its kind in the US. There's a massive unmet need; all critical care patients, and all people with diabetes in the hospital could benefit. Studies have shown you can achieve a 30% reduction in mortality, and 25% reduction in length of stay, in addition to the hours per day you save nurses from managing blood sugar. It's a win/win/win on the lives saved/cost savings/nursing time saves, so we think it'll be pretty important when we hit the market!

Sad to see how few other hard healthtech people there are here, they seem to be few and far between.

Can you tell me the difference between your product on the types of prescription cgm + insulin pump combos like dexcom/tandem which offer some level insulin control?

I'm just curious. I run an xDrip set up and I've played around with a couple of the "DIY" closed loop setups.

Our device is for inpatient use, so it's a little more complicated than your typical DIY APS you might be used to as a T1/T2. You have to account for all kinds of different drug interactions, perfusion issues, undergoing surgical procedures, etc etc. The biggest single difference is that we use dextrose as a way to quickly recover from lows (like an automated orange juice dispenser).

Because we're in the hospital and can access IV lines, we also have rapid access to data, and the drugs we infuse get taken up much quicker (5-10 minutes for insulin, 3 minutes for dextrose).

The terminology is overlapping but the space is very different than outpatient glucose control.

Why use dextrose instead of glucagon for lows? B/C patient liver function may be compromised more often in the in patient setting?

In addition to liver function, you can't always rely on patients to have glycogen stores to draw from.

Additionally, dextrose is inexpensive, more available (rural county hospitals don't stock glucagon), easier to mix and store, has a longer shelf life, and most importantly, has a far quicker response time.

Glucagon has promise for outpatient work, where the volume of fluid is much more of a factor, though the stability and cost are still unsolved problems. The patients we treat are in a bed, monitored periodically by trained healthcare providers, with routine access to a pharmacy.

TL:DR Hospital control is just a different beast!

Cool - check out my company: https://replica.health - We automatically log a bunch of data for diabetics based on things like activity and location, and provide an LLM powered search engine for that data. You can ask our system questions w/ natural language like "show me data about whenever I get low post-exercise". If theres any crossover, I'd love to chat about it.

I'm mostly curious about the modelling that goes on under the hood; are you just using deep learning, or also integrating something like UVA-Padova to fit your absorption curves?

Hey, my wife has diabetes, and she's had really awful luck with automated blood sugar monitors. Somehow their readings are always off by insane amounts vs a finger poke

Have you done much research into that area? Do you know if there's a brand we should check out or any common gotchas? (I can't find much reasonable info on this online due to my poor Google skills and all the bad info out there..)

Consumer finger pricks are actually less reliable than CGMs these days (relative difference of up to 25%, vs 10% for something like a Dexcom G6). That being said, a few things you can try:

1. Wait 24 hours, the CGM needs time to adjust to your body

2. Don't overcalibrate in the first 24 hours, or when sugars are in flux. You'll mess up the factory calibration which can lead to worse accuracy over the session.

3. Try a different insertion site. Behind the arm and on the abdomen are the two most common ones.

4. Talk to your endo

5. Call your CGM maker, they will almost always overnight you a replacement if it's demonstrably failing.

We had great luck with the latest generation of Medtronic pumps (the 700 range).

It used to be that they (older models) were off by huge margins, and the auto modes had to be constantly calibrated against as it was often not only off, but suggesting/dosing dangerous amount in either direction.

Nowadays, SO calibrates a few times a week and the pump is extremely reliable. Longer periods of highs are usually due to infusion set leaking (eg. line snagged and pulled the needle).

Like the other reply, it takes a day or two until the system is reliable.

Sensor on back of the arm, infusion on stomach is the combo we've found to be the most safe and reliable sites. Make sure you rotate as often as possible and avoid putting them in the exact same spot.

My wife has Diabetes and recently switched to a CGM. She also saw the insanely inaccurate results.... BUT it improves. After a few hours the numbers get more accurate as it adapts to you. Now she does a thing where she overlaps the old sensor with the new sensor for a couple of hours every couple of weeks. She also still occasionally uses the finger prick method because its results are more indicative of where you are going in the short term.

Wait until your wife's blood sugar is stable to apply a new sensor.

Calibrate it several times when her blood sugar is stable. (Stable means not changing. I want to see a line on the CGM like this "-------------" not one that is going up or down.)

Make sure your test strips and CGM sensors are in date and have been stored at reasonably indoors temperatures.

Source: My wife and I both use CGMs. Our common medical issues were something we had in common.

That's awesome! At least in my limited experience developing health care hardware is much more challenging when there isn't a clear "regulatory path" that has been done before. Which makes it harder for completely novel devices (eg versus making an improved pacemaker which already has been approved)

The good thing for us is that artificial pancreases are regulated not as one device, but as three separate (interoperable) devices: the pumps, the sensors, and the control software. Only our control software is under a de-novo pathway ("totally new thing" pathway), everything else is 510k ("we know what this thing is" pathway). We also have Breakthrough Device designation, which really accelerates the regulatory timeline

This is fantastic, good luck to you. We need more of people like you.

Amazing! I'm a doctor and founded a software company (https://www.piahealth.co) - even for software as a medical device (SaMD), the regulatory hurdles are tricky and time-consuming, I imagine it's at least 10x for hardware. I have huge respect for what you're doing and hope it makes a big impact.

Sounds super cool, are you guys hiring?

Not atm, but Soon (TM)

I was working in medical devices for sometime. I remember Medtronic doing artificial Pancreas. How is yours different?

Theirs is ambulatory, i.e. for people to wear in their daily lives (mostly T1 and insulin-dependent T2). We're targeting a market that currently doesn't exist -- hospitalized patients, specifically people in critical care and people with diabetes on the general care floors. Similar terminology but very different markets!

Their latest AID (automated insulin delivery) system is killer, btw, some of the best results I've ever seen for ambulatory!

Ah ok. I have worked on medical devices in hospital environments i.e the recent Roche Glucometers similar to Cobas.

>Their latest AID (automated insulin delivery) system is killer, btw, some of the best results I've ever seen for ambulatory!

Yes, their medical devices are really good and also very interesting especially their pacemaker implants and also DBS implants for Parkinsons disease.

There was another fantastic device called VAD pumps by Thoratec for which I worked on a PoC. What a crazy tech that is. Thoratec got acquired by St. Jude and finally by Abbott.

Through your work have you heard about anyone working on something of a more permanent replacement?

I hear a lot—relatively speaking—about insulin regulation, but in my case the issues are enzymatic. Susceptible to pancreatitis (hopefully all it is).

Any word on the street?

At any rate, keep it up!

Something like an implant? Unfortunately I think we're probably (and this is a wild guess) 50+ years away from being able to fully replace all the hepatic & metabolic functions of a human pancreas in some kind of implantable. They're incredibly efficient, and also horrifically complex, and if you mess up the balance they keep, it's pretty much a death sentence (see: pancreatic cancer).

Controlling glucose is far easier, by comparison; just one input, and two outputs.

Sorry to hear about your pancreatitis, hope you can find a treatment plan that works for you!

I'm doing well, so no worries!

I had no idea those two functions were so different in scope. Nature is a never-ending source of amazement for me. Thanks for the info!

We make the world's best baby car seats. https://www.kioma.us Fatherly Magazine calls it "The Car Seat of the Future". It's been crash tested, flight inversion tested, flammability tested and mom tested. It is full of patented innovations to make kids safer and parenting more enjoyable.

It required lots of material science, production techniques, supply chain adjustments, and a surprising amount of software (to model dynamic stress, and to run the robot and CNC trim paths). Once you get to the point you can clearly articulate your BOM and Specs to a manufacturer for MOQ=50, things get a lot easier. At the prototype stage we built everything ourselves, but now we use OEM manufacturers.

Looks nice and easy to clean. I don't know why the regular "Target car seats" have so many creases and folded layers, it's a major PITA to clean :)

Some are better than the Target basic ones, but even the "good" ones are way too complicated to clean, and it's like they've never even considered a kid might barf whilst in one, and some of the effluent will disappear into some weird crevice never to be revealed again.

Thanks! All the cushions are removable (velcro) so you can hit it with a hose and separately wash the cushions. The interior chassis surface is smooth, which is a big point of pride for us as it is easier to clean.

This feature is totally underrated in industrial design. I've had to clean many fridges over my years and every time I find horrible black mold in all sorts of crevices caused by poor design decisions and decisions based solely on cost.

For anyone else who doesn't know off hand what MOQ stands for...

BOM: bill of materials, aka list of what it takes to manufacture a product

MOQ: minimum order quantity, the lower limit the manufacturer will accept

These look amazing, like they solve all the pain points I've had with car seats over the past five years. I'm a little past that stage now but wish these had been around when I had little babies.

Thanks!

I am a bit skeptical dad but damn these look nice! The price is justifiable, although personally I'd hesitate because the seat is only good for about 2 years, and the seat seems to weigh higher than Nuna products which we got.

More like 18 months or less based on the height and weight limit, completely impractical pricing

You totally underestimate how much baby fever tax first time parents are willing to pay using the logic "once in a lifetime only".

This is exactly what I meant when I said the price is justifiable. It is designed to be advertised as a premium product to an exclusive set of customers.

Lots of couples stair-step their kids. It’s not 18 months for a lot of families. It’s 4-6 years with hand-me-downs.

Baby seats have expiration dates and it’s scary how many parents fall for the emotional manipulation around that. It makes the used car seat market dead as well as hand-me-downs

>it’s scary how many parents fall for the emotional manipulation around that

Are you saying that the expiration dates are bogus? I knew that rated sports helmets and similar products had expirations, but not car seats. Maybe I'll go check the handed-down seat my son is using...

They're basically bogus but put out because people don't bother inspecting the components and the makers really like selling additional ones.

And basically all thrift stores and other used good dealers won't touch them because of the perceived liability.

I wouldn't care about an expiration date, but I avoid the hand-me-down car seat market for the wreck reason. The carseats are only designed to be in one. I personally wouldn't know how to definitively say it had never been in one.

Hand-me-down, to me, connotes reuse within the same (possibly extended) family.

I'm fine sharing our used carseat with my 6yo only child's grandparents so that they can more easily help with my nieces and nephews (2 weeks, 1yo, 3yo, 4yo, and 5yo - oof!). My wife and I know it's not been in an accident, we would not misrepresent that to the detriment of our own family.

But I would not buy one from even the most trustworthy Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace listing imaginable.

I personally would love tamper-evident components within a carseat - think "Tip and Tell" [1] but for 3-axis accelerations. Impact-sensitive product labels exist such as those at [2], but I'm not convinced that the same accelerations and crashes that would damage polystyrene impact-absorbing foam would set off a glass ampule designed to break when you drop a rental camera lens or something like that.

1: https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-866/Damage-Indicators...

2: https://spotsee.io/impact

NHTSA guidelines on re-use post crash are at https://www.nhtsa.gov/car-seats-and-booster-seats/car-seat-u...

We actually sold our 2 year old nuna for nearly 75% of it's original price to another family. It had 10 year warranty and not recall/accident. I doubt how much these would go for secondhand. Which is not an issue if you stair-step the seat.

Sizing > Realistically, the seat fits average kids up to 3 years. At the 95% percentile on height most kids will outgrow a rear-facing car seat at 18 months (the growth of the torso is the limiting factor). From a labeling perspective we have to be careful, though, because the US regs on sizing are really terrible. Keep in mind the regs were written in the 1970s when we were still teaching Americans to wear seat belts. So there are 2 "options" in the US regs: 22 lbs 12-month test dummy, and 39 lbs 3-yr old test dummy. Lots of manufacturers claim their seats fit the 39 lbs mark, but they squash the test dummy's legs into an unrealistic position for a child (passes the test by the letter of the law, but misses the spirit of the law). Basically, we designed this seat to fit kids until they are ready for a front-facing seat.

Pricing > It isn't for everyone. The Kioma seat is like a Maserati, but some people prefer a Ford Taurus. We have to charge a price to cover our production and design costs, and there is a quantitative and qualitative difference in the materials and performance of a Kioma car seat.

> The Kioma seat is like a Maserati

Perhaps not the best brand to invoke for a product where reliability is paramount. If you want to convey both luxury and reliability I'd go with Lexus (fancy Toyota).

;) Point taken.

$1000 is too much for Target and Walmart, but for Beverly Hills, the Hamptons, etc. that's nothing. If your living room has space for a Peleton bike, this will fit right in.

You don't put your Peloton in your living room like some peasant if you're buying a $1000 car seat.

What if you live in a $9000/month 900 square foot condo in the bay area?

"room" for the bike was metonymic for "room" in your budget

I'm the kind of guy that thinks I might be able to sell it for a good price, if it is high quality, after the use. Making the total money spent way less. But that begs the question, why not rent these out for 18 months at a time?

renting assumes previous users properly maintained these seats. Car seats are "supposed" to be disposed of in the event of a collision due to possible cracks or other fatigues in the structure not necessarily visible to the end user. If you rent, you have to assume the seat was not in a structurally significant event. That's a lot of trust.

Given how these car seats are advertised as having high-tech materials, I wonder if the manufacturer can install a crash detection module in them.

Most likely because you can't guarantee how it has been used once the first customer has used it. And that will lead to major legal problems if e.g. it has been in a crash and is now compromised, but nobody noticed, then failed to protect the 2nd child.

The foam doesn't stay good for long, I think the car seats we had expired after 6-7 years?

Also car seats can't be used after a crash, even if visually they looked ok. Maybe they could be refurbished (new foam, etc), but obviously this is a liability concern and probably isn't worth it.

Just like motorbike helmets?

Thanks! We worked really hard on the design to be functionally useful while visually striking. We are fans of Bauhaus design.

Weight > The total weight is probably similar at 10 pounds even. The company you mentioned likes to quote partial system weight and doesn't include the weight of their canopies and inserts. We've already made the lightest car seat in the world (2017, carbon fiber) at 5 pounds all in, and one of the lessons we learned was that adding weight can be a good performance trade if done well.

We also have a baby seat that can pretty much say all the same things. There must be tons of these on the market with swivel etc. What makes this better than the rest?

1. Safety (* see below)

2. Ease of Installation (* see below)

3. Bauhaus Design

4. 1-Hand Operation

5. Ease of Cleaning

6. Built in Rocker (a full one)

7. Quiet (* see below)

* Safety > The US regs are pass/fail so lots of seats on the market have mediocre test scores that don't reflect the real danger of severe concussions. For those of you interested in digging into the obscure world of Head Injury Criterion: greater than 390 HIC is linked with severe concussions (Source: Proposed limits for HIC From Kleinberger et al., 1998, and Eppinger et al., 2000.) Kioma seats do a number of things (crumple zones, etc) to create a lower (better) HIC score. By comparison some of the top sellers in the industry are at 600+ HIC.

* Installation > The regs don't have standards that really address this, but the incredible complexity of legacy car seats has led to a lot of installation errors by parents and caregivers. This can lead to some really unpleasant outcomes and injuries. We designed KIOMA to minimize use and installation errors by making things as simple and intuitive as possible. This seat is optimized for lap belt use only (no base required). The companion base has a number of innovations too that make it intuitive and easier to use.

* Quiet > There are no clicking or snapping or button parts that wake a sleeping child (with the exception of the harness buckle). This is the quietest baby car seat made.

Regarding safety, do you have any links around the test results for the Kioma, or other car seats? You've mentioned a lot about the safety scores/test results in comparison to other car seats, but I couldn't seem to find a single mention of that stuff on the website? I also tried to see if something like Consumer Reports had a review of a Kioma car seat (either the current one or the carbon fiber one) but they had nothing.

Test Results > NHSTA used to publish their test results of all car seats, but no longer do so. FMVSS 213 (the US standard) tests for Head Injury Criterion (36 millisecond), Excursion, and Peak Acceleration in a frontal car crash. So keep in mind the utility of the results has limits, and doesn't test for a whole lot of things that are part of real-world usage in and out of a car. *Big grain of salt.*

I'll give you some real numbers and leave the comparison for you to do (lawyers get itchy if we do the comparing directly). Our carbon fiber seat's best result is HIC 197 in FMVSS 213 testing with a Crabi 12-mo old test dummy. Our friend Eli at Magic Bean's reviewed it in a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGaU9R6jHCQ The current car seat for sale is of a similar class but doesn't have the $2500+ price tag of a carbon fiber seat.

If you're still curious, we can take this off HN: drop me a line at support@kioma.us and just mention HN and your HN profile name.

Why only lap belt? Isofix is so easy.

You get both: isofix/latch as well as lap-belt. Each car seat is sold with an accompanying Latch (aka Isofix) base so you can roll with whatever you prefer. However, lap belts are ubiquitous and work really well.

Reasons to use a base:

1) Convenience. It is nice and fast to click-in, click out with a car seat. Super fast and easy.

2) Protect the seat cushions of the car.

3) More constraints on pitch rotation. Which can be good or bad depending on how the seat is designed and rotation is used.

Reasons to use a lap belt only (no base):

1) It is intuitive. Everyone -- including grandma, grandpa, and the babysitter -- knows how to use a lap belt (as opposed to a latch/isofix base).

2) It is ubiquitous. Every automobile and plane seat has one. So if you're hopping into an Uber, no problem.

3) Lab belts are designed to stretch which is actually really good in a collision. The stretching lowers peak acceleration, and therefore lowers the likelihood of injury.

4) Total system weighs less, which translates into less force in a collision (F=ma).

Many thanks for the thoughtful reply! Coming from Europe here where it’s been on every car for about 20 years so has become very much the norm.

Belt (1) troubles me slightly in that it’s easy but not necessarily intuitive enough for grandma to get it right every time (and indeed many don’t). The base has the great benefit of being definitively installed correctly (all goes green / stops beeping).

The reported numbers on belt errors are pretty terrible: https://www.besafe.com/child-car-seat-misuse-study/

A good dialogue is always fun. Thanks for bringing some science to the thread.

You've hit the nail on the proverbial head regarding misuse. Misuse is a problem across installation types: belt-only, and with Latch/Isofix. Some people get so confused they install with both methods.

Lowering misuse is a top design goal. Stated differently: we want to make things so simple that people have to work hard to make a mistake.

You are absolutely correct that belt misuse is a problem (per the cited GDV study). Latch misuse is still a problem too, though.

The studies make clear that misuse is common across installation types, to various degrees. The studies don't do a great job of exploring why the misuse occurred (The 2005 NHTSA study below did ask some good follow up questions). For example, Why did someone not use the belt path correctly? Was it because the slot was too narrow? Was it not visually obvious? Why did someone install both the Latch/Isofix anchors onto the same mount point? Why did someone leave too much slack in the Latch/Isofix anchor or the seat belt? Etcetera. The reasons why people misuse a seat are very valuable to improved public education and improved product design.

NHTSA's 2005 large field study found 39% of CRS (aka baby car seats) were incorrectly installed with Latch. Many of those had multiple errors (e.g. twisted belt plus latch connector turned upside down). Table 11 has the details in https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/latch_report_12-...

10 years later, NHTSA's 2015 study with NCRUSS data found misuse was still persistent: "Overall misuse is considered as having at least one defined misuse present in the car seat or booster seat – the seat may have one or multiple misuses, where one misuse has the same contribution as multiple misuses. The overall misuse is estimated to be 46 percent with a 95 percent confidence interval ranging from 39 percent to 52 percent. By car seat or booster seat type, estimated misuse rates were 61 percent for forward-facing car seats, 49 percent for rearfacing infant car seats, 44 percent for rear-facing convertible car seats, 24 percent for backless booster seats, and 16 percent for highback booster seats." Source: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

So for all those parents out there, read your seat's user manual. The user manual will make it clear how to properly and effectively use the seat belt or the Latch/Isofix anchorages.

Isofix is easy in theory but if you don't know exactly where the fixing points are, then it's like fumbling around in the dark. Sometimes it's hard to see the fixing points while trying to get the seat on.

I think that situation is something many parents recognize. Usually when the baby is screaming etc.. wonderful.

Once you've click the base in, it's easy next time though. Yet, my wife still considers fitting the seat as the man's responsibility. :-)

Parent here too, with three different seats (two are rotating, permanently affixed to the base, 0-3yrs, one is a removable base, 0-~1). All of which seem to have little torches on the isofix lugs, and the little one feeling infinitely more stable when using the isofix and leg as opposed to just the base. I will say the permanently affixed ones / bases weigh a tonne. Being able to click in and out was a delight when we were able to use the little seat.

I'm not sure if its a brand thing, but the isofix bolts on my last cars (Volvo, BMW, Audi) were all really well signposted, and in little plastic housings which you couldn't miss, even fumbling around. The ones on my wife's Ford are just sort of hiding behind the cushions, which doesn't seem as elegant.

Toyota Land Cruiser here. They are sort of visible if you have proper lighting or if it's during the day. They hide behind leather flaps so best bet is to feel your way to them.

Ok, I'll bite.

I don't want to expose my child to exotic glues, adhesives, PFAS, or any other foreign molecules in their car seat.

How does your product stack up?

Why are you driving them inside a car that has literally all of these in the first place then?

GP's asking a legitimate question about chemical outgassing etc. Parents have concerns like this, and some parents more than others.

let me go pedantic and teach: "The customer is always right" does not mean that no matter what a customer says, you give them a false smile, and pretend you agree with them.

"The customer is always right" means "you are hearing actual feedback from your target audience; somebody giving attention to your product is experiencing friction and wants information or reassurance, and is taking the time to let you know"

Do you know how valuable that is? Most people exposed to your product (ads, PR, etc.) just move along. Customers who don't like your product generally just disappear.

Free market research should not be ignored. This customer is not only right, but is representative of a whole class of customers that you need to learn to win over.

>>GP's asking a legitimate question about chemical outgassing etc. Parents have concerns like this, and some parents more than others.

Obviously, and outgassing happens a lot in any car especially if it's brand new. So I'll ask again - why drive kids in a car at all if this concerns them this much?

>> why drive kids in a car at all if this concerns them this much?

Because they have to

Genuinely confused what stance you're taking here

>>Genuinely confused what stance you're taking here

That a car is going to expose your child to an order of magnitude more "chemicals" than a baby seat ever could - it's like asking how much sugar is in your coleslaw that you're having on the side of a large five guys milkshake. Probably some, but if you're concerned about sugar you have much bigger things to worry about.

if you are having a large milkshake, I would advise against adding more sugar to your meal. I'm not wrong, I'm giving healthy advice. To follow my advice, you simply need to ask if there is sugar in the other things you order, it's a simple, meaningful question.

Sure. I think you're still missing my point , but you are of course technically correct.

> why drive kids in a car at all if this concerns them this much?

do you want to be right and nyah nyah nyah the guy, or do you want to sell him a carseat that you worked hard on that's safer than any other car seat you know? If your car seat is made of the same materials as every other car seat, or if by chance your car seat is actually safer than other car seats, why wouldn't you want to let them know rather than you telling the guy "you're an idiot for putting your kid in a car!"

all car seats go in cars. Wouldn't it be nice to have a car seat that did not add to the danger?

>>or do you want to sell him a carseat that you worked hard on that's safer than any other car seat you know?

I don't want to sell him anything. Have you confused me with the OP maybe?

I have zero alternative to cars where I live. I do everything possible to minimize my sons exposure to chemicals, which run rampant in our society.

Every single purchase I make, I try to be as informed as possible.

Does this offend you?

Oh it doesn't offend me, I just find asking if a baby seat contains "exotic glues"(wtf is an exotic glue) silly in the context of transporting kids in a car.

>This customer is not only right, but is representative of a whole class of customers that you need to learn to win over.

That's not always true. If a certain subset of customers wants something ridiculous, they can either go elsewhere or learn to adapt. For better or worse, companies often times have the ability to drive public sentiment just as much as they have the responsibility to pander to it. When Apple removed headphone jacks from all their products they did so against a torrent of outrage, but fast forward 5-7 years and they absolutely made the right call. People learned to get over it.

Catering to bordering-on-harmfully-obsessive parents isn't always the best call.

I didn't say cater to every whim of every person.

I said listen to the customer because it is a legitimate point of contact, and they are not going to be the only one thinking what they're thinking, and even if you want to ignore them, you don't want to create a scene in front of other customers, so you can still think about and learn from the experience. The customer is always right from the customer's perspective, and you need to understand your customers' perspectives.

The user you're replying to appears unconnected to Kioma, so I don't think they have any winning-over to do here.

Valid point.

Exotic glues? Foreign molecules?

I wonder. Are you aware that keeping your living space exquisitely clean compromises the development of a childs immune system?

I don't think the human immune system develops against offgassing like it does pathogens

I assume you are worried about off-gassing, and direct ingestion of harmful chemicals.

TLDR: We stack up really well.

1) No flame retardants are used in the upholstery. We worked really hard to meet the flammability requirements with materials that aren't doped in endocrine-disrupting flame retardants. So that was a big win, because that is the largest chemical exposure in legacy car seats (in my opinion) and it is one that the scientific literature is very clear about.

2) The chassis is mostly machined aluminum (powder-coated) and polycarbonate. On the underside of the chassis there are some bracket retention pieces that use a standard cyano-acrylic glue ("super glue").

I'm not in the market for a car seat, but just want to say that I think you've done an awesome job responding, and I'd be looking at your car seat for sure after reading these :)

Thank you! Encouragement is always welcome.

Thank you so much for this response.

You're welcome. Thanks for asking! If you have other questions, please drop me a line at support@kioma.us and mention your HN profile.

Do you use these for your children?

Yes, but my kids have outgrown them. When my son outgrew his seat, he sometimes still used it as a rocking chair to read his books in his room.

The price is insane man. The best of the best car seat according to lots of reviews(Cybex Anoris-T) is "only" £599, your thing is significantly more and I don't see why it's any better.

Edit: sorry, let me rephrase that - not insane, just hard to justify.

I am always entertained by the extra amount people are willing to pay for the tiniest bit of risk reduction (or appearance thereof) for baby and kid related products.

For example, paying an extra $900 for a car seat, but then taking the kid on unnecessary car rides, which are magnitudes riskier than not taking the kid in a car. If you are willing to pay that much for such an immaterial decrease in risk, surely you should avoid taking the kid in a car unless absolutely necessary.

Although, I guess some of it is also showing what you can afford.

And some of it is buying convenience. The peace of mind from knowing you have the safest seat allows risking more rides which frees up impromptu errand scheduling. Whether the math actually works out is orthogonal to the psychological effects.

What counts as an unnecessary car ride for you? If I'm going to the grocery store and there's someone else to watch my toddler, I don't need to take her with me, but I think the bit of stimulation of getting out of the house and seeing a new place, new experience, and new people has a benefit that outweighs the almost inconsequential odds of a major car accident as I drive there and back on roads with a speed limit of 35 MPH.

It's about convenience. Refraining from taking certain car rides to reduce the risk is inconvenient. But for a wealthy customer, there is no difference between buying car seat A or B, but if A is $900 more and slightly safer, it's logical and just as convenient to choose it.

Our risk assessment is as emotional as is logical.

When it comes to driving specifically, my friends will buy a 50k SUV to feel safe, but will then buy cheapest plasticy tires or refuse to join me in advanced safety class.

That being said - kids are vulnerable, fragile, and don't make their own decisions. As a newish parent myself I 100% understand the extra pressure that puts to make the best possible decision for them.

I mean I know people who seem to get in an accident once in a while — sometimes completely their fault — and other people who have driven 20 years everywhere and clearly drive better and react quicker than anyone else I know.

So by all means, someone doing something or not doesn’t mean much.

People can do both, though: drop unnecessary rides and also have the safest seats.

I don’t think kids are even that fragile. In many ways they bounce back from more than adults!

"The baby's okay, they're safely nested in a unibody machined aluminum enclosure. I've been told those are indestructible."

Ya - if I could afford this and didn't, and the kid died - I'd always wonder if the better seat would have saved them. I have a really good seat (this didn't exist), and also (probably equally...or more importantly?) a very highly rated car.

Safety is a great way to sell this product, though the price may limit who buys it.

Thanks, though, for taking a look!

I used to know some of the Cybex people (it was a European company), and they congratulated us on beating their best safety scores at the time. Now Cybex is owned by an Asian conglomerate (Goodbaby).

The Kioma difference in materials quality and performance is both quantifiable and qualitative. We have to charge a price that covers our work in design and production costs. But I completely get it if the Kioma seat is too expensive for your preferences.

As a side note, if you want to be blown away by prices check out the $10,000 cribs (https://nurseryworks.net/collections/cribs/products/gradient...), $1000 bassinets (https://www.happiestbaby.com/), and $5000 strollers (https://silvercrossus.com/category/strollers/).

Thanks for the feedback!

You can tell that guy's not a parent, haha. It's a shitload of money, but at least in this case I know that I'm getting value out of it. It's very easy to piss away a fortune on badly-made Chinese plastic trash in the world of baby accessories.

>>You can tell that guy's not a parent, haha.

I find it really interesting that you reached that conclusion. Me and my wife spent what feels like an absolutely insane amount of money on a car seat, definitely more than any of our friends have spent(the beforementioned Anoris-T, because as far as I can tell it is the best seat you can buy) and the idea of spending $1000 on a car seat just doesn't fit in my head. It's just too much.

>> but at least in this case I know that I'm getting value out of it

Really? how?

Agreed, my only thought on the $1000 price tag was that I already have a seat that is well rated and don’t want to throw away or donate a perfectly good $800 car seat/stroller system.

Like cheap end car seats when we looked were in the 200-400 and nicer ones were in the 600-1200 range.

There are many brands of car seats available at Walmart/Target for ~$100, plus or minus $25.

What’s the value? Lol I’ve used the same $250 one for 3 babies now and 0% of them would have noticed “high end materials”.

Luxury balls, bargain babies.

Just a note that the infant ones have a 5-year lifespan from date of manufacture. Not sure if it’s the nylon straps or the foam mechanical characteristics.

We were gifted a hand me down and I had to cut the straps and bag it.

We ended up handing down the two infant sized ones we got that were the same model.

Also any car seat involved in a collision needs to be disposed of.

I dislike waste but you don’t mess with car seats and helmets.

I am a parent, and in my opinion, spending $1k on a car seat is completely unreasonable. (We bought ours used as part of a package deal with some other used baby stuff. It would have been nowhere near $1k when new.)

What do you think about spending $1k on a phone?

My question is why it's $1000 and not $999.

It depends.

The thing about the baby market is that, because it’s driven by emotional decisions, there are buyers at every price point - and it isn’t even directly related to wealth. Some people get into debt trying to make this harsh world safer for their newborn, even though safety benefits taper off as the price increases.

For me, I picked the lower bound and my wife picked the upper bound on the price range we were looking at. She is frugal above all else, I am safety conscious above all else. We met in the middle and found one that suited.

It required some negotiation to begin with though, because her upper bound was lower than my lower bound - and was firmly in the “dodgy unbranded wholesale, sold on a website with an invalid SSL certificate, claiming to be UK based but registered to a Chinese address” territory.

When buying used car seats, remember to check the "use before" date that is marked on it. They only claim to achieve the designed strength/protection for a number of years. At least in Europe.

What is that based on other than them wanting to sell more seats? I'd imagine the materials don't erode, otherwise how safe can it even be in the first place?

Nothing. It's a marketing gimmick to depress the used market. The only way they "expire" is if the regulations change, which does not happen often.

I thought that was an American thing since I couldn't find it on our car seat

So ours has a manufacture date and I know people look at it and if it's older than 3-4 years they won't buy it off you, but as far as I can see that advice isn't anywhere in the manual of the seat. Maybe some seats "expire" in some way, but it sounds like an urban myth.

Don't think it's an urban myth, this article shows a car seat with an expiry date next to the manufacture date.

https://psychoautos.com/why-does-my-car-seat-have-an-expirat...

As a parent - the only way I’d buy this is if I knew I could resell it later and it’d hold its value.

What is the “expiration date” on your seat?

Is there a standard safety test for this stuff? When I did some research a couple of years ago (my daughter is 1.5 years old now) I found some test by an european institution that had the Axkid One+ on top, so I bought that one.

The US standard is FMVSS 213. In Europe, seat manufacturers currently must comply with standards UN R44/04 or UN R129 (i-Size).

I have no experience whatsoever with baby carseats.

But I get so frustrated with garbage on the market, and the struggle to find decent quality goods. I've created my own where they don't exist (eg. current limiter for plugging in laptop power brick on a plane, untrasonic eyeglass cleaner and dryer, tongue-activated mouse button) which is hugely labour intensive. If I need your thing, your thing is as good as you say, and you can sell it to me for less than that costs me in time, materials and lost opportunity, then for me the math is simple.

"Mom tested" might not be the best thing to say if you want moms to buy your product

Someone further down the thread had a similar negative response to that phrase and suggested maybe "parent tested" as a substitute? Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, "parent tested" is good.

The strap is a single point of failure. Each mount should be attached to the seat brackets individually. Those brackets need to be braced and not just bolted through plywood.

Having patents on innovations is necessary, but if you have innovations that will save kids lives, you should find a way to make those broadly usable by all.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US10967762B2/en?oq=1096776...

This this TOS usual for a piece of regulated safety equipment?

The KIOMA Car Seat is provided “as-is, where-is,” without representations, conditions or warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. The recipient or buyer is solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using the KIOMA Car Seat.

Not sure what you are referring to about a strap being a single point of failure.

Patents > We don't work for free, and we can't buy groceries by giving away years of R&D. Companies are welcome to license our safety innovations, and they know how to reach us. The invitation to do so is on our website.

TOS > Kioma seats come with an industry standard 1 year warranty. The website TOS are different than the product warranty that comes with each seat. Thanks for the heads up though. I'll have the marketing team clarify that.

“We don’t give years of R&D away for free” is a pretty flippant response. You make money selling car seats, and if another company can produce better seats at a lower price then consumers win and lives are saved. Which is ostensibly exactly what you want to happen? Otherwise why even be in the car seat business?

Cmon be nice to the car seat people :). Let’s say it cost $10 to develop this groundbreaking car seat technology, and $1 to make a car seat, so the company charges $1.50 to make up their investment in 20 sales. If they gave away their patent, then another company (who didn’t have to pay that initial cost) could sell the same seats for $1.

This is episode 1000 in our favorite series: why and how capitalism strangles innovation

The flip side is that R&D is a lot easier and cheaper when you don’t have to worry about accidental infringement. But your last paragraph suggests we’re already in agreement.

In any case, I’m fine with companies making the pragmatic choice to pursue patent protection. But being defensive and flippant about it isn’t a good look. It’s much better to argue for instance that you put yourself at a disadvantage if you’re the only business that doesn’t patent their innovations, and that a patent portfolio also has a defensive function.

I mean, you could just be more flippant in response and suggest that the best car seat is the one without a car in the first place

> The flip side is that R&D is a lot easier and cheaper when you don’t have to worry about accidental infringement.

Not when you're a hardware company. You typically rely on external vendors and long feedback loops between iterations for development and have to pay people along the way and in-between. Your remark that someones is morally obligated to give their innovation away before R&D costs are paid for, or really at all outside of a licensing model, is so far left field it might have a seat with the cars.

Thank you for the support. You have eloquently explained the innovation conundrum.

That’s a pretty naive way to look at it. A lot of patented products have a positive impact on the world, should all of these be shared?

What if a small player tries to break into a market with a nee solution? They should give away their IP to the big player purely because it has a positive impact on the world?

Just because their product is more safe doesn’t mean they automatically have to share this with everyone. They put time and a lot of effort into this, and that should be rewarded. The world rewards people with money. Sure some people might be happy with knowing they saved more lives, but eventually most people just want to be rewarded.

> A lot of patented products have a positive impact on the world, should all of these be shared?

Yes. It’s bad to criminalize innovation. Most patentable innovations are not so unique but only a logical next step given prior inventions.

Also, patents favor the big players in any market because they have the money and the will to grind down any newcomers with legal action. The upstart with fewer resources should always be in favor of a level playing field.

If it was obvious, why didn’t some big company already do it?

Likewise, the big players in any field spend vast resources on R&D to produce the better products, and the patent is the only thing that makes that sustainable.

It’s all well and good wanting the world to be a safer place, but every company is beholden to its shareholders and debtors. Resources spent must be recovered or it all falls down.

Strange how all those smaller companies filing patents are so idiotic to work against their own interests. Somebody should tell them.

You underestimate the revolutionary role of patents in allowing to innovate in the open.

Do you want to know what is the active substance of a new medicine? Do you want other researchers to know it and critique it, and build upon it? And for FDA to have easy time learning everything about the medicine? Allow the medicine to be patented.

Otherwise every other factory would start producing it, having not paid anything for years of R&D. Nobody would be able to secure a loan or investment for said R&D, and especially stuff like clinical trials.

The alternative is trade secrets, quakery, and loss of knowledge forever if a particular project fails.

Patents have their downsides. The fee structure could be different (progressive with time), the duration can be discussed, some areas should rather not be patentable (large families of substances, or software), but the idea is pretty sound and important.

>if you have innovations that will save kids lives, you should find a way to make those broadly usable by all...provided “as-is, where-is,” without representations, conditions or warranties of any kind

no, individuals should play by the sames rules of the collective as everybody else.

There is nothing wrong with you advocating and/or successfully changing the rules of the patent system so all players must behave this way, but trying to shame a small entrepreneur into being boy scout is ihmo bad for all of us. I bristle at all the moralizing people do on the daily.

I'm advocating for "think globally, act locally", just without puritanism or maoism.

> The strap is a single point of failure. Each mount should be attached to the seat brackets individually.

That's not how our Recaro seat works, nor our original baby seat, nor the booster for our older son. Each of them attaches to the seat anchors using a single strap with clips on either end, one on a length adjuster.

This design looks pretty much the same; the plywood is just protection for the car upholstery, and doesn't act as a load-bearing element.

Yes to this.

I wonder if there would be a market for in-built hard modular mount points for the back seats. Like, let's say I'm Tesla. I build in mount points for the back seats. And then I sell accessories for the mounts. Tesla branded baby seats. Child seats. Storage/shelf solutions. Dog cages. Pizza delivery rack. Who even knows how many things one could put back there

It is called Isofix and most modern cars are have those (mandatory in US and EU):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isofix

Like isofix? I think even Teslas have that. Or do I misunderstand?

Your Tesla manual may call it Latch (the US version of EU's Isofix). Same thing but different name.

Adding to the list of “same thing - different name”: in Canada it’s known as UAS (universal anchorage system)

if you have innovations that will save kids lives, you should find a way to make those broadly usable by all.

One way would be for you to buy or license the tech and give it away. Is that something you're considering?

We're happy to license out tech.

Any seat belt in an automobile is a single point of failure by your logic. Seat belts are fantastic tech, though. Seat belt webbing is designed to take 11,120 Newtons (FMVSS 209). Textile science is pretty cool.

It looks just like a regular one. When the special features are plastic and foam that doesn't scream high quality to me.

Why not make one that's solid steel and can tank a direct hit from a bus? You could make some really funny advertisements with crash test dummies.

I like your sense of humor. The engineers used to jokingly call this the "Orphanator -- the seat so safe only the kids survive the crash." Our marketing people told us to leave the ideas to them....

In a collision, rigidity is actually the enemy. A well designed seat should never be reusable after a crash because all the materials yielded to dump energy. It is better to have energy diverted into stretching, bending, and breaking materials than have it channeled into a baby's body.

We don't use steel (except for one rod), but we do use a lot of 5000 series machined aluminum which is powder-coated. Aluminum is preferable because it is better for creating crumple zones where the materials yield. The other primary material we use is polycarbonate because it has fantastic impact resistance (polycarbonate is used in "bullet-proof glass"). I'll let the marketing team know their materials description failed to impress you :)

Will you sell in Europe and does tha car base have an isofix mounting?

1. Yes, it has an Isofix mounting which in the US is called "Latch".

2. We cannot currently sell directly into Europe, though we'd love to at some point. If you're a distributor please drop me a line!

There's zero videos on your website, and zero videos of it on youtube. As someone in the market for this that's the first thing I checked. Get some videos up on Tiktok as well!

I'll add it to the marketing team's todo list. Thanks for the heads up!

Just gonna throw this out there - your pitch is awesome, and “mom tested” put me off. Maybe I’m just a Californian but “parent tested” is a bit more 2023

Great feedback. Thank you! I'll pass it on to the marketing team.

One big problem with all car seats is that after 3-4 you have to dump an expensive and still usable seat. And I mean dump, since they cannot be donated AFAIK. It would be great if the seat can be disassembled to be used for another purpose.

<sarcasm> Think of the dollar cost amortization! You need to have more children to average down the cost. So you can use the car seat across 3-4 kids. </sarcasm>

In all seriousness, the problem with donations is people are afraid of attached liability. It is a shame, because car seats can often be used for several years across multiple children. If you keep it in the family and use it across your own kids, everyone is cool with it. As soon as you donate it to someone else, people worry about liability.

I know it isn't much solace, but we try to minimize use of non-recyclable material. The 5 pounds of aluminum in a Kioma car seat is recyclable and will net about $4.00 at current Al spot rates. So you could disassemble it.

There's probably a business model around refurbishing the "core" of the car seat. Take it back, run it through a CMM to make sure it's not been in any again impacts, then resell as a refurb or 2nd life unit with new padding and absorb the liability. A $600-$700 upcycled unit would be appealing. Or offer re-certification as a service. CSaaS

I know it’s easy to be critical, but I want to provide feedback. That placement into the base looks difficult and frustrating.

I see two main issues.

1. That clearly requires the installer to apply non-trivial force to lock it into place. Beyond it being awkward, a Graco Keyfit is a drop in, no force install. Amazing.

2. In most vehicles, fire-aft distance is a huge, limiting factor. It seems difficult, if not impossible to tell if the seat has latched into the correct position, without additional tilt. The Keyfit base makes this obvious since it will not latch into place at incorrect angles.

Feedback is always welcome. Thanks for checking it out! I may botch the response to your points, but I'll give it a try below.

Force > To use the base, yes some force is required. In our opinion, you want force to prevent false-positives on latching. False positives are a big problem with bases, as people perceive latching to have occurred when it actually has not. Visual latching indictors are not sufficient, in my opinion. Our experience and design encourages audio, visual, and tactile feedback to minimize misunderstandings and false positives.

Please note that while a base is convenient (people like the quick click-in, click-out of bases) it is not needed. You can just use the seat belt. Roll with whatever you prefer. Personally, I just use the seat belt.

Fire-aft> I have no idea what you mean by "fire-aft distance". But it sounds like you are worried about angles. We designed the seat to encourage good angles at rest, whether with the lap belt alone or with the companion base. Most automotive seats have a 5-10 degree upward angle. A rear-facing infant car seat should be resting in place at no lower than a 30 degree angle, and no higher than a 45 degree angle. If you go too high it increases choking risk but conversely improves the crash test scores. If you go lower it is better for a baby at rest and has less choking risk, but worsens the crash test score as more force is distributed into a smaller area and less rotation of the seat is possible. All this to say, there is a lot of variability across vehicles and seats in a vehicle, and to the best of my knowledge no car seat base accounts for all the permutations well. Regardless, angles are important because babies (especially younger ones) are still developing the muscles that hold up their head and have less head control than it might appear. For the parents out there, the final back angle should be approximately between 30 and 45 degrees as measured from a level plane, but please refer to your seat's user manual for its instructions. In most scenarios and vehicles the Kioma car seat should rest at an approximate 40 degree angle.

Competitor Comparison > We try to avoid direct comparisons with other companies, because it makes the lawyers wince. However, while I'm biased, from my personal experience I can say I'd take the Kioma any day over the competitors. There are many reasons we built this product, and none of them included "existing [insert company name] does a great job at this!"

> "fire-aft distance"

Sorry, darn auto-correct on my phone.

"Fore-aft" distance is what I meant. Essentially, the distance from the back of the child's seat to the driver's seat. In nearly all vehicles we own (including mid-sized SUVs), it's a close fit to install a baby carrier. In some cases, the front seats will be pressing against the carrier (unavoidable in some cases). With a full base, it's very obvious when the carrier is being pushed up too far by the contact and we need to adjust.

Ah, ok, and thanks for clarifying. The Kioma base is low profile (vertical height), and only 1/2 inch out from the passenger seat upright face (your "fore-aft" distance). It does not extend out past the seating face of the passenger seat, or otherwise hang off the passenger seat. Low and slim generally results in a shorter moment arm from the anchorage point (where the latch/isofix mount points are), so reduces the collision forces for the seat/baby.

The Kioma seat is about a standard length, and the width is narrower than competing seats while fitting the same size baby.

Fun fact: the International Standards Organization (ISO) helpfully defined several envelope sizes (r1, r2, etc) to help with baby car seat standardization, and the EU crash regs (see UN r129) even have a test bar that represents the back of a driver's seat.

Looks nice. Is it foldable so that we can carry it on trips abroad?

I've read the whole thread , I've looked at your product.

It looks good , the materials seem fine , but have nobody heard about ISOFix? At least in europe is standard in new cars.

The last baby seat that I used , manufactured by MassiCossi , had a better base than yours, with an adjustable aluminium leg and ISOFix links that kept it sturdly attached to the seat frame.

It was not cheap too, around 500 euro I think.

It was also removable with the press of a button , from the base and from the trolley

Edit: I missed a comment referencing it, then it seems strange to me that a seat sold as somewhat of a luxury item doesn'support that

Glad to hear you found the thread interesting.

Kioma does provide an Isofix detachable base, but in the U.S. it is called Latch. Same thing, different name. All U.S. infant child restraint systems (CRS) must either have Latch attachments permanently to the CRS or must provide a separate detachable Latch base.

So we do provide a Latch base. We don't do a base load-leg though, because there are some cool things done with rotation to dissipate energy :) This is one case where the EU regs specified an implementation rather than a result. Otherwise the EU (r129) regs are very well written.

Hand-blown titanium crystal glassware for whisk(e)y and spirits.

Produced in Europe by a glass factory that has been operating since the late 1700's.

PG's mantra "do things that don't scale" has been a great inspiration.

I wanted something comparable to high-end wine stemware and it shockingly did not exist, so I designed it during COVID. This is my first physical goods venture and my goodness, it comes with a lot of challenges (as an American I've intimately learned the difficulties of Brexit, for example) but I wouldn't change anything for the world. It's so satisfying to see people use a shining piece of glassware made by real human craftsmen.

The speed at which the glassware been welcomed in the community is overwhelming (both emotionally and from a pure business logistics perspective) and I couldn't be more grateful. Now, just 18 months post-launch, it's used in distilleries ranging from Scotland to Jamaica and Michelin starred restaurants.

For the HN friends, use the code HACKER for 10% off glassware :)

https://www.bennuaine.com/

Fascinating. It’s like a cross between a Teku glass and a white wine glass. Gorgeous.

Thanks! I like seeing how many folks know about the Teku beer glass. Very different use case, but the shape philosophy is similar.

With Bennuaine it was really about fine-tuning the dimensions through a ton of research and prototyping to reduce ethanol burn while at the same time highlighting finer notes.

"Lots of good advice simply doesn't scale." —Paul.Graham

I definitely think "Made by Humans" will become an increasingly-popular product highlight.

Beautiful effort. Wish I still served alcohol =D

For sure! Obviously it's good if some things are made by machines (like things that requirement super-fine tolerances), but the movement towards "Made by Humans" is trending away from "hipster" or "nerd" into general appreciation and that's very cool. Even if it's just for "for the marketing", the end result is that someone is getting paid for job with tangible results.

I particularly like it with the glassware because machines literally can't make this glass at its current quality; it HAS to be done by hand to have this level of refinement.

Cheers. Nice to see something whiskey related that isn’t trying so hard to communicate the usual whiskey stereotypes.

It's something I battle against every day.

I'm constantly told that whisky shouldn't be served in a stemmed glass. Honestly, I think half of my job is education.

The masculinity of the marketing message towards spirits is deeply embedded in American culture, which is why big tumblers are commonplace even though they don't do spirits justice. You don't see those stigmas in wine. The community is definitely way more gender friendly now though which is great. If my glassware can play even the tiniest part in making spirits more accessible, I'd consider this business a success.

Are glencairns not common in the states? Whilst most pubs in the UK would serve me a whisky in a short tumbler style glass, I would be disappointed if a decent scotch bar did not at least offer me a choice.

In bars with decent brown spirits programs they probably use them, but no they're not anywhere near as common as they are in Europe.

I've also never seen them in Michelin-level restaurants here because the quality of the glass isn't up to that standard.

What's the brittleness like compared to glass? Is it more/less shatter resistant than other crystals?

Crystal is stronger than standard glass which is why it can be so thin.

Modern production of lead-free crystal is generally pretty good now. Old leaded crystal is extremely brittle and prone to chipping and fractures which definitely soured people's perception of its durability. Our glassware uses titanium as a strengthening additive which really helps durability as well as sparkle.

Most of our hospitality partners use them in service every day in commercial dishwashers with very little breakage. Having a shorter stem also greatly reduces both tipping and twisting scenarios which are the most common sources of breakage.

How do you mix the Titanium into the crystal, and does it bond in some way, or how does it strengthen and improve the durability?

Crystal consists of many raw materials with silicon dioxide making up the majority of the mix (70+%). Titanium dioxide is melted in with everything in a brand-new solar powdered furnace that runs up 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit iirc.

Titanium has the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any metal which is why it's used in the most demanding applications like rockets.

Each glass manufacturer uses their own recipe and pretty much all of them use aluminum, rather than titanium, as their strengthening additive simply because it's exponentially cheaper.

Glass is normally made with 50-75% silicon dioxide (sand, basically) and the remainder various metallic salts or oxides like lead oxide, soda, potash, etc. These are combined as powders and when you melt them down they all dissolve together into glass.

From a layman's perspective all these metallic compounds seem really different from glass but in reality that's the magic of glass. I'm no chemist but SiO2 doesn't seem chemically very different from PbO or TiO2.

Neat! Ordered a pair. I especially love the dishwasher safety and lead-free elements

Love it! Thank you!

Usability was very important in development. The crystal is dishwasher friendly and as is the design itself (I wanted them to be able to fit in the top-racks of consumer dishwashers as most wine glasses are too tall.)

These look great. I went to order a pair of the tumblers, but the hacker discount code didn't work:

> HACKER discount code isn’t valid for the items in your cart

Ah, should have been more clear. The code is just for the stems.

The new tumblers are 33% off (automatically) though since they're on a pre-order special right now!

Hello. These look great. But a few things that I'd like: 1) The glass does not specify a volume. 2) I'd love a wine-glass, highball and old fashioned style as well.\ 3) The Whisky & Spirits Tumbler does say 'lead free crystal' but doesn't specify it's titanium glassware. Is that correct? Cheers!

Hello! 1) Full volume is about 6oz 2) Noted! 3) Correct, the tumbler skips the titanium because it's our more affordable product and it's less needed because the product does not have a stem.

I am making and selling an eink smart screen.

It can display a google calendar.

You can also point it to any url that serves an image.

Is it okay to post a link?

https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...

I am planning to release more applications for it and I am opening the platform for 3rd party applications.

I see that shipping to Europe is not yet supported. Do you have plans soon?

CE certification is extremely expensive for a bootstrapped startup.

Plus there is Elektroschrottverordnung and Verpackungsrichtlinie and all that stuff.

You can send me an email at info@invisible-computers.com

Is it UL certified?

Wait, you are situated in Flensburg but not shipping to EU? That seems rather interesting... Do you also manufacture in germany or have you sourced that out?

The wood is CNC'd in Germany, the metal back cover is from Spain. :)

PCB and screens are from China. The final assembly happens in my home.

I try to run a short supply chain to limit my inventory risk.

I'd love to get this but for iCal display. Any chance that's in the cards in the future?

It’s in the cards, pretty high in the stack, but I never make promises.

If you can write code and you don’t want to wait for me to add it to the default calendar app, you can build it and release it as a 3rd party app:

https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...

Got it. I'm not the right person to build this functionality so I'll just wait to see if it comes and buy later if so!

Very cool! Are you able to make a full-time living off this product yet?

Not yet. I’m hoping to, so I can fully focus on it.

Give it Home Assistant integration, or at least MQTT control, and I'd buy at least one

> You can configure this beautiful the e-paper display to poll any HTTP endpoint for an image. Just paste the URL into the iOS or Android app. The image will then be displayed on the screen. And when it changes, the screen updates.

Looks pretty simple to do.

I think the idea would be to be support a way to set that HTTP URL via an API, not requiring use of an iOS/Android app?

I imagine this might be a case of documentation and support as supposedly the app is already using the API endpoints we'd like to have.

Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean. How would you physically connect to this API without an app and without a backend?

I'm not saying necessarily without a backend. Just being able to "self-service" via API (ie if everything I can do via the app, I can do via curl, it could be interesting).

Self-hostable backend (benefits: privacy; less trust required; I know it'll still be usable even if you shut down your backend in 5y) would of course be great but a separate thing to the above.

Do you use an ESP32? Could you? You could use ESPHome https://esphome.io/

Ideally the device can create a wifi hotspot when it isn't setup that I can join and setup all the needed config settings. WLED does this as well https://kno.wled.ge/

Do you have docs on the API / integration mentioned here and on the website? Would be good to know in broad strokes before buying one. Sample apps and whatnot

Here is the API description:

https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...

And here is the sample app:

https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery

Admittedly, I am not the greatest technical writer, but I compensate by being pretty responsive. So if you have a question, just message me :)

If you can document how to make this show a calendar from Office 365 that would get you so many sales.

There is no native outlook support (yet), but it works if you sync it via a google calendar.

Here is a guide on how to do it:

https://shop.invisible-computers.com/pages/outlook-calendar-...

That gets you a sale, bro. :)

Now my family can see my calendar easily.

I'll purchase once Outlook calendar is supported natively.

I'm taking you by your word ;)

I'll email you.

I'm guessing since it's plugged in, there was no way to make it last long enough on a battery?

Love the idea, will bookmark it for the future office!

Battery is harder to make safe and harder to certify as safe.

Plus, I like the idea of plugging it in and never having to worry about it.

Still, I am thinking about adding a battery about twice per week, so it's definitely on my mind.

Consider a "bring your own battery" option where you have an interface that's moderately standard.

Any chance you'll do a larger one? I've wanted exactly this but closer to ~13-inch to replace the "family wall calendar".

It looks great, though! Any good place to follow/subscribe for updates?

So far I only have an instagram: https://www.instagram.com/invisiblecomputers/

Larger displays are not excluded as a possibility, but I like the current size for placing it on the desk. Also, larger displays are disproportionately expensive, and the display is already the main cost driver.

Totally fair. I hadn't checked the cost of larger e-ink, and you're right, I probably wouldn't pay $500 for the same thing you're making but 13".

Still going to keep an eye on it, though. I may end up talking myself (more accurately, my wife) into a smaller display.

For the same price one can buy a 10.5" Galaxy Tab A8. But still, very cool. I wish e-paper wasn't expensive as hell and so dreadfully slow to update, it would cut down on energy usage in so many applications.

But the Galaxy Tab doesn't have a paper-like screen ;)

True, but it can also do almost anything instead of just being a calendar and a picture ;)

Any chance of having mini HDMI input to use it as something like an Onyx Boox Mira?

Probably not, I'd like to keep the device as simple as possible. The Onyx Boox already exists and it's great ;)

Oh, a fellow hacker from my little home town :-) Greetings from the other side of the fjord and best of luck with your business!

Love this idea, been waiting for you to ship to Canada and now finally purchased :)

Currently your Android app isn't available in Canada yet though

You're right, thanks for the hint! I have now submitted it to Google to be released in Canada as well. Usually that is approved pretty quickly.

Just ordered. Looking forward to getting it!

This display looks great, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous that you acted on the idea first (; Best of luck, I think the future of e-ink, edge computing, battery efficiency, etc. will only make these types of products even better down the line!

Way cool. Just added this to my Christmas wishlist.

As a non-techy nerd it’s a perfect niche with built in usage and no need to hack. Thank you for posting.

How did you get into e-ink screen programming? I read here that e-inks are a market dominated by one company and that all the toolchain is owned by them, did you make your tools yourself?

Nice product, btw.

We started in 2017 aiming to build world’s best video headset for drone pilots ("FPV goggles", for those in the know). Based in Europe, where we do all our R&D and MFG.

Surviving these last three years was, well, as hard as you can expect. Raising money was a challenge (hardware, in Europe, Central and Eastern Europe). We started scaling MFG just as the COVID started closing down China and crippling supply chains. Front row seat at the chip shortage horror show: just as we started delivering the first units of our first product, we saw our critical components go from €5 to €100 a pop, and lead times go from "shipping tomorrow" to "we may be tell you when it may be available in a few months, but not sure."

Today, we’re alive to tell the story. We expanded from headsets to pretty much every piece of tech you need in a drone; all designed and built in Europe. We do FCs, ESCs, control links, analog video links, data links (WiFi, 5G/LTE, SDR), flight computers, as well as drones, drone controllers, etc. We have a drone sim with 500k total downloads. We also do our own private mobile networking infra (5gc/epc RAN, gNB/eNB). We do HW, FW, and "normal" SW.

We’ve pretty much consistently doubled our revenues every year since inception, but it’s been a wild ride. While our US counterparts were raising tens of millions with similar traction and a fraction of tech collateral, we never got much love from VCs. Raising is still a bitch.

Last five years were blood, sweat, and tears, but I’d do it all over again, cause building physical stuff is the best job in the world.

What’s the name?

As an FPV Enthusiast, I suspect strongly that this is Orqa/ImmersionRC (which merged recently).

> video headset for drone pilots ("FPV goggles", for those in the know)

Orqa FPV.one

> Based in Europe, where we do all our R&D and MFG.

This is a pretty clear indicator that it's Orqa - few other folks in the FPV space are Europe-centric

> We do FCs, ESCs

Commercial gear

> control links

ImmersionRC Ghost

> analog video links

ImmersionRC Tramp

> data links (WiFi, 5G/LTE, SDR) flight computers, as well as drones, drone controllers, etc

Commercial gear

> We have a drone sim with 500k total downloads.

Orqa FPV.Skydive

Was I right, TooSmugToFail? :D

Are they as good as he mentioned?

I guessed it was Orqa but was surprised about some of the other tech mentioned - I had no idea that they had merged with ImmersionRC!

Spot on! :)

> Raising is still a bitch.

If you are on this side of the fence, you might want to get in touch with Ukraine. They invest in drone startups.

https://sifted.eu/articles/small-dronemakers-ukraine-tech

We're building hearing aids that work in noisy places (AudioFocus[1], YC S19). We use novel machine learning and microphone array design to help patients hear better in loud restaurants, weddings, & family gatherings better than any other AI hearing aid.

It's a big deal because untreated hearing loss is associated with social isolation & depression and while 37M people have hearing loss in the United States, only 8M use hearing aids. Hearing in noisy places is the biggest reason for lack of adoption.

We just got our behind-the-ear (BTE) hardware prototype running and already have several excited patients. Listen to an audio recording from it here[2]. We're currently working on a pilot study with a professor in San Francisco.

If you, or someone you know, is interested in participating in the pilot study let me know. And if you know interested investors, I'm happy to chat with them. I can be reached at shariq@audiofocus.io

[1] www.audiofocus.io

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orU5Wx6_RfA&t=24s

Do you have a Coral Edge TPU in your device?

Love this idea. I hoped that my AirPods with Live Listen would do the same but was disappointed that it sounded similar to your benchmark example or worse.

I wonder if you all can use another layer in your ML stack to "fill out" the voices once you've isolated them. Your example leaves voices sounding very thin/hollow and even a bit garbled.

I don't run the show and it's not my company, but I work on simulation devices for developing surgical skills. We have these MEMS and laser sensors for tracking surgical tool movements that the founder came up with.

My impression after 3 years in a product role is that it is amazing what a ~5 engineer team is capable of achieving over a couple of years. However, we're located in Poland so employees are cheap, we're heavily subsidized by huge grants and funding. Our offices/facility is in the middle of nowhere.

The engineers are quite stressed out because their work depends on many external factors that they don't have much control over (shipping, ordering components, manual assembly etc.). They literally run a workshop - they argue about who's using the tools, what the 3D printer schedule is like.

It's so many things at the same time - it's super slow, production and QA is a comedy, design changes are challenging to implement. Product certification and patenting is an enormous challenge. Business is super slow (our customers take years to make up their mind and they buy with public tenders).

But on the other hand... they do also seem happy and proud. I mean I love the product, and I love showing it off, UX testing, etc. And there are few competitors on the market, so it's also quite stable.

I think hardware is more accessible and doable than it used to be - 'hardware is hard' is something my industrial designer dad would repeat in the 90's.

> we're heavily subsidized by huge grants and funding

this is how it is in Canada too! My city has a huge manufacturing sector so a lot of these little startups with super niche products that take lots of R&D are found there. But no one talks about us because engineers aren't paid doctor money here (the grants aren't THAT good, which I think in the US defense sector they are).

Hardware is hard:founding hardware engineer, we were acquired 4 years ago by a corporate. We place WiFi sensors around your network that behave like typical clients. We report on user experience and show when there are issues in your network. WiFi technician in a box.

The fact that it’s subscription based is what made us float.

The initial capital outlay, supply chain, compliance and design work is so funding intensive but can we done on budget if you are wise about it.

We had to build a full web app and rich backend to report the results, a device team to write the sensor software and of course hardware design.

About 50% of our funding went into supply chain costs just to get the first units out the door. The rest into staffing. Without the hook into the large hardware manufacturers/China we had a pretty heavy BOM cost.

It was rough but the Saas portion once it was up allowed us breathing room.

It’s critical to design for compliance in your target markets and critical to manage your spend on components. A minor design mistake in your hardware will destroy your brand - where with software it’s a patch away.

Shipping and tax costs are another killer which add so much cost overhead and are often over looked.

It was stressful I’m glad we found a corporate home as it allowed us some breathing room to focus and redesign things with a budget safety net.

Does it actually connect or just measure the signal? If the former, have you had to deal with all the various auth schemes that companies use? I know that Cisco in particular loves to create their own schemes.

It does a full connection and session and yes at first we thought it would be easy then we realised how many different auth methods are around. Over time we have grown to support most of them.

Including being able to navigate a captive portal and login.

A brother needs a link.

Are you able to roam/hand off between APs and measure the reassociation time? That would address a monitoring need I have right now.

Currently we measure association times our new sensors will have an extremely detailed set of roaming information for themselves as well as clients around them.

We became Aruba UXI

So many tech channels on Youtube are watched by people who work in places your tech could help, and these channels are starving for content non-stop. You should reach out to some like LTT, Level1Tech, ServetheHome.

we use such a thing called wyebot. it fits the description of that business model but afaict they all do. we went with to not be stuck with vendor proprietary systems eg aruba uxi.

it’s been horrible. feels like a hardware hobbyists product and not an actual solution. will stick with whatever the vendor offers next time.

a successful version of this product seems to me much more of a software product than a hardware product. the hardware is a couple of radios in a non offensive box. it’s nothing novel unless you go with SDR and even then i mean it’s been done. maybe poe power is a real challenge on that i’m not sure.

The company became Aruba UXI ;) it’s also specifically vendor agnostic still.

The hardware is not super complex it is indeed a robust Linux computer in a box. We have a insanely low failure rate since we want them running subscriptions for years. Making it robust in this sense was part of the challenge.

Our power backup feature using super capacitors to keep it up after you lose power and still testing is the most novel thing.

We have some secret sauce in the WiFi driver side that gets us extra information.

thanks for insight. will be looking at uxi!

We make a camera system for construction sites. Using computer vision, we can identify when and for how long subcontractors show up as well as notify our customers of unwanted behavior on site.

https://bedrockwireless.com/

Fun fact, we probably have the best port-o-potty detector in the world.

Always nice to see another ConTech!

If this were a camera that identified when and for how long a software engineer showed up to the office and notified their employer of "unwanted behavior", how long would it take for that story to end up on the front page of this site and torn apart as invasive and infantilizing?

I guess I would say that subcontractors are more like hourly workers (who are time tracked meticulously in almost all industries) - not salaried like software engineers, who would deserve the respect and absence of tracking.

Not really, in the housing industry, it is generally job bid instead. The contractor taking longer just means they get paid later and don't get as many jobs done.

Also, Unions hate this right?

It's less about tracking how long they're there and more about when they showed up. We do the former because we can, but the GC really wants to know if and when their subs are showing up without having to be on site 24/7 waiting for them.

For example, they can look back through yesterdays events to see that their plumber showed up - and then they'll know they need to go check on the work. The alternative is trying to get the plumber on the phone to figure out if the work had been completed or not - which is difficult in 2023.

There's not a lot of unioned workers in most states for residential construction. But autoworkers, and anything else in manufacturing would be used to the constant monitoring. Commercial construction also typically has fulltime site superintendents, who would do this anyway.

That's an interesting angle. My Father actually, by chance, owns a residential drywall and finishing business. The 'did the plumber show up' factor is key. Though I'm not sure why this couldn't be solved by having the subs of a builder agree to give basic job updates. How do residential customers feel about someone's camera watching their house?

Anything that makes the GC more efficient is going to be a win for the future homeowner. This might get more problematic for remodels, but we primarily work with new home builds.

The GC can often bill it down to the homeowner as antitheft, which reduces time/money to complete the build. The biggest being time. An example, if custom windows are stolen, it could delay a project by months right now.

If you've worked with these people you know that there's nothing "basic" about getting job updates.

I would argue salary employees deserve more tracking since they are given more freedoms. An hourly worker is paid hourly, and given tasks at a much smaller interval.. often by day and sometimes every few hours. If you have quarterly goals for salary employees, they probably need more 'tracking' to make sure they are doing what you expect as time goes on.

Thanks to both the parent for raising the ethical issues in this product and to OP for responding/addressing them. Our industry gets a lot better when we don't shy away from both asking and answering these kinds of questions!

So to clarify: as long as a worker is hourly, they don't deserve any privacy or respect, and can be surveilled at will. That's pretty incredible.

Hourly means “paid by the hour,” so verifying time on the job is directly related to salary. “Punching in” on remote worksites is the problem being solved with this solution.

I think if these got to the point of "worker stared at floor for 7 minutes" it would be invasive. If it tracks when a vehicle shows up to site and leaves.

That being said, as someone with digestion issues, tracking bathroom habits is offensive.

In short, yes this is invasive. But much like AI, this type of thing isn't going away, there is just going to be more lawsuits about it in the future.

We should make it illegal by law.

We don't track port-o-potty use, just if they move. Vandalism is at an all time high on construction sites, tipping port-o-johns is a common teenage prank and the GC needs to know if and when this is happening on sites (and hopefully catch the perpetrators).

Hmmm… going to start a company that makes portapotty anchors!

Software engineers have full-time managers (which are a lot more overhead to pay for but kinda serve that purpose from the client perspective) and are paid well enough and consistently enough to usually only work one job on a given day. Subcontractors sometimes do decide not to show up to your job site because another employer offered them a bonus to do theirs that day instead. The point isn't (only) to humiliate or do a show of power to the workers, it's to counter an economic incentive they have.

That said, for a lot of subcontractor trades, it's so hard to find anyone that I'd worry about the reverse: you get known as "the freaks with the cameras" and no one good bids on your stuff anymore, and then the delivery is even more delayed.

> it's to counter an economic incentive they have.

I think economists would call that a feature and not a bug. It is essentially an auction (something economists LOVE). You could instead take that money that you're spending on surveillance and instead spend it on giving the contractors a bonus to show up to your place instead.

I really don't buy that this would "shame" them into coming to your place first. Everyone already is aware that they don't always show up because you got out bid. You're "solving" the problem the wrong way because you're not addressing the actual problem.

I would imagine shaming doesn't work because I think residential GCs have higher demand for workers than there is supply, but the cameras still solve the problems of making it easier for the GC to react when it happens (and the reaction could be offer to pay that sub more if the project is late or all the other subs have been showing up, realizing the work from the earlier stage wasn't done, and going home, or it could be lengthening their project schedule).

Perhaps the GCs are unaware of the surveillance themselves

Maybe a gentle reminder that automated surveillance happened to us first, by our own kind nonetheless. It's now a norm in the industry.

This is great! I built a house and DIY'ed this because our site was 2 hours away from where we were living at the time.

It was clear (our) GC was not used to this because they were constantly telling us that things were happening when they very clearly weren't (thanks to the live video we had from to the site).

We occasionally get the homeowner to buy our product to monitor their GC - the GC always hates this. This in-turn leads us to recommending that the GC (if they're the buyer [most common]) to never share it with the future homeowner as that usually causes the GC to be overburdened by the homeowner.

I applaud you creating your own solution, many GCs can do this, but most can't or don't want to deal with it.

Looks neat, is your core product the AI for the construction site object detection?

We make the whole camera system because we couldn't find anything on the market that allowed us to do the AI we wanted. The value for the customer is all in the AI tracking and security detection as well as the ability to just login live and see what's happening on site. So, yes, our core product is our software, but we had to make the hardware to capture market share.

Your website shows OEM cameras and an off the shelf plastic enclosure, along with basic LED floodlights. What hardware are you making? Not saying your product isn't cool, just not clear what hardware you are "making" vs. assembling.

You're not wrong. We have custom boards inside to handle the AI compute and power, but we mostly do assembly.

If a software startup assembles a bunch of open source hardware together and packages it as a product, would you say they don't "make" software?

Is assembly manufacture? Is glueing together FOSS libs coding? Probably not but I'm No True Hacker.

If a software startup assembles a bunch of open source hardware together and packages it as a product, would you say they don't "make" software?

No, I'd say they are more of a software company than a hardware company though. All software runs on some kind of hardware, but these days it is pretty rare for that hardware to be very unique or custom.

I was mostly just curious what custom hardware you had, since that was the topic at hand. My curiosity comes from working in the surveillance AI space for the last ~15 years, and having done a number of custom (as in we made the whole thing) cameras with AI, but now there is a trend more towards using a lightly OEM'd camera with custom firmware in many cases.

Considering the availability of cameras with advanced SoCs capable of doing edge inference, I wanted to ask more about your hardware and your design choices in this market, but I think I'll just bow out. Good luck with your startup!

This is a bit like saying "I made you a birthday cake", when what you did is bought a cake and bought some candles, and stuck the candles in the cake. It's of course semantics, but I imagine people would look at you funny if you said you "made" them a cake when you clearly bought them one.

This is pretty neat. I'm wondering if something like this (on a smaller scale) could be used to catch the elusive illegal dumper in my neighborhood.

We're working on this solution. Most housing projects have a semi-permanent dumpster, but GC's often have problems with people dumping in their houses' dumpsters, causing them to pay for more refills on their dumpster, which can get expensive.

Since we record motion on site, we typically catch the illegal dumpers, but it's hard to pick out from the many motion events that may occur on a construction site.

A regular camera can’t do this?

Many years ago I worked at a startup doing this - putting cameras on tower cranes. Fun times. Took a while to find PMF and the startup ended up going under. Good times, was super fun!

How does knowing someone is on site lead to an increase in anything production wise? All they'd have to do is wander around and look busy. Some people are willing to do this over real work despite it being a task in itself.

Subcontractors are businesses, if they're paying people to wander around on site, they have big problems.

It's more about the fact that GCs struggle to get accurate schedules around when their subs will show up, the subs are in too high of a demand (think plumbers, electricians, framers). So they ask the subs to come out and complete a job and the sub responds with, "we'll be there sometime next week." Sometimes they show up, sometimes they don't. GCs need to know when and if they are showing up.

how big of a pain point is this?

Intresting but I dont see something disruptive here, it may work in some specific places but in other countries like Mexico (where I live), someone could easily destroy or damage it, also the connectivity issue in rural areas (where a lot of the building market is interested) should be an issue... maybe it has a business niche but I cant see the mass adoption and innovation here

I'm wondering what the benefit is here. Pretty much every job site has a pole with security cameras installed already. What does this do that wouldn't be done with building an integration for your analytics for the major VMS out there?

We're building Volition [1] to organize the world's mechanical components for MechEs, roboticists, mfg. techs, and beyond. Imagine McMaster-like UI quality, but ultimately across every good OEM / distributor.

I previously built Plethora (automated CNC machining) and am happy to help all hardware / manufacturing startup folks. Please feel free to reach out.

[1] https://govolition.com/

This looks fantastic. It would be really great to have some proper competition to McMaster in terms of making part information accessible. I'll keep this in mind for future products, good luck bringing it fully to market!

Thank you! Would welcome any and all feedback you've got!

Ever since I first touched Octopart, I've wished there was an Octopart for mechanical components. This looks like it comes very close, and I love the look and feel.

Wow, your website is excellent and FAST. Good luck to you.

We're building a device to secure your most precious secrets. https://betrusted.io (project overview) and https://precursor.dev (details). It has the form factor of a screen-and-keyboard retro-phone.

Our hardware is simple and Open so it is easier to verify. There is no "hard CPU" (it is all FPGA based) so you don't have to trust anyone about what's executing your code. The entire system runs on a pure-Rust OS (Xous) which is an async message-passing microkernel, details at https://betrusted.io/xous-book/.

Out of the box it comes with U2F/FIDO2, a TOTP authenticator, and a password vault. It's one of the few U2F/FIDO2 tokens that you can make a backup of. As the system is fully open source, you can extend it with your own favorite apps.

Hi Bunnie! Totally unrelated to Precursor/Betrusted, but could you ever do a post-mortem for the Novena? I always liked the quirky form factor and the modularity of it (the Peek Array, the suggestion to use an eink screen if you're on a long trip with no chance to plug it in, etc). Do you think current projects like Framework and Pine64 could adapt/adopt some of the design principles you had in mind back then?

Cool! I'd considered buying something like this, but for personal journaling.

Betrusted looks great, I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.

Xous looks really interesting too. I'm curious why you chose to build your own OS from scratch and not use something like Tock[0][1] which also happens to be pure Rust.

[0] https://tockos.org/

[1] https://github.com/tock/tock

A few years ago I made a Kickstarter for an augmented reality helmet -

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/realjds/spartan-hud-nex...

Fun project, made some sales and a small profit, then hand-built and delivered the units from my apartment. Lots of learnings.

Applied to YC and got an interview but ultimately didn't get in - I agree with their feedback that the platform was too general and "lacked a killer app". But it's a cool research platform due to its generality: you get a full Linux computer in your heads-up display, and can connect arbitrary USB peripherals (we had a version with a depth-sensing camera).

Over the last year on weekends I've been working on a new light-weight version that allows one to drop in their smartphone or other ~5" screen, and actually orienting a specific version towards the sport of airsoft. Polycarbonate encasing around a modified helmet protects the electronics as well as the user's head.

Hope to try it out sometime later this year; lately I've been pre-occupied with my day job and learning all the new AI software and theory out there.

If anyone is interested in this project and wants to connect, ask questions, etc, feel free to reach out via email (in my profile). Cheers!

A full on helmet? That’s awesome.

I reject the claim that there is no killer app. Have you not seen Judge Dredd? ;)

But seriously, I like this. Honestly I think I’d rather this than a normal headset. There are so many design challenges and compromises made because of the notion that they should only cover the eyes. But that approach just leaves us looking gormless to any onlookers, so there’s not much aesthetic benefit.

Meanwhile your design looks, for lack of a better word, badass.

Thanks so much! Comments like this definitely are reassuring :)

I'll definitely make a post on HN in the future when the next version (airsoft focused) is up and running!

As someone who used to work at an IoT company the consumer space is brutal. Unless you've got something you can sell for 10x BOM, or there's naturally a subscription based model then it's not worth the blood, sweat, and tears.

10x BOM? Why is the bar so high for profitably?

There are manufacturing costs, marketing and inventory risk. But still… what am I missing?

The probability and cost of failure? And/or alternative revenue streams with lower volatility available to people with the skill to pull it off.

NRE into the production line, especially hard tooling for plastic is huge. Plus all those things you mentioned, especially inventory risk are often underestimated.

Don't forget that any manufacturing run itself is a huge risk. Tiny changes that need to be made to address anything from RF performance to fit and finish can invalidate a run and just burn up hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars (depending on scale)

Yea, that’s why I’m not using plastics for my product.

Even for something like HDPE? I did a project a while ago that was effectively a pontoon workboat. We used HDPE pontoons in lieu of stainless steel and the cost savings was about 25%. I assume that the raw materials (basically large diameter HDPE pipe) and plastic welding tools were just that much cheaper/easier.

I was interested in doing a new HDPE product development on my own, but I'm a bit nervous this is a deep tooling rabbit hole.

The math is this: BOM + cost to acquire a customer + cost to sell the unit < sale price

Otherwise you don't have a business. Please don't ask me how I know this.

10x is a rule of thumb, YMMV. You just need to make the above inequality evaluate to true. You can (maybe) raise money to deal with the various non-recurring expenses. Oh and you should pay your employees too.

I’d love to get your advice, can I contact you?

Dude, I'm just an engineer who can do basic arithmetic.

Yeah, but you'd be amazed how few people do that basic arithmetic!

It's not that it's hard to do the math, but it's hard to find product market fit where that inequality is satisfied. And sometimes people think they are gods gift to hardware design and can't be reasoned with to do a cost down.

The more 0s you add the closer you get to how Apple prices its products I guess.

QA/QC is very expensive, especially for low volume. You send something out to a customer, they claim its broken, you ship out a replacement at your expense, maybe the customer eventually sends back the broken one, then it sits on the shelf for 2 years because you don't have the manpower to do a root cause investigation. Now you've sold 300 units and have replaced 50 of these and you have no idea why they're broken, what went wrong, and have to a a full validation of each one from scratch. Most of them seem to work fine in your test lab (maybe it was the customer's fault? But maybe your design is incompatible with their production environment?) and the rest all have unique problems which each take 1-5 full days of investigation to nail down a root cause.

Maybe 2-3 share a single root cause, and it's not clear how you'd prevent this from happening in the future.

If you're shipping large volumes, this can add 10% to the MSRP, but if you're shipping low volumes, $50-100/hr of weeklong diagnosis and investigation can easily add 50-300% to the price of each unit.

And that's if everything else is going perfectly. Which means you lucked out and found an amazing Chinese contract manufacturer who works with you hand-in-hand to fix any design bugs and manufacturing issues, and ensure parts availability.

If you're doing such low volume, yet your service and customer relations is based on big corp style, sure you're going to have big problems. If you sell only 300 of something, and returns are coming in, you should be figuring out why ASAP. And probably talking to the people before they attempt to send it back.

That's pretty much what they are saying as far as I can tell? My experience is pretty similar to theirs, root cause analysis takes a lot of time per device, and there's rarely once single failure cause for all of them.

Supply chain into consumers is brutal: retail outlets mark up products by 100% (ie you sell them something for $100, they sell it for $200). If you use a distributor, that's another 100% markup. 10x BoM on consumer price means that some of your biggest sales channels to consumers (BestBuy, Walmart, Target) are paying you 25-33% of what they get from customers. To get your own markup, you need 8x BoM.

We’re building the MouthPad, a smart mouthwear that serves as a universal Bluetooth controller. Using tongue, jaw, head, and breath gestures, users can interact with devices like smartphones, tablets, computers, and IoT gadgets. Our solution offers expressive, unobtrusive, always-available hands-free control.

We’re addressing a significant gap in assistive interfaces. Current technology has not kept pace with users’ needs, especially those with hand impairments, limiting their engagement with the digital world - a crucial space for learning, socializing, and working. We’re driven to unlock their potential and enhance independence.

Our immediate target is helping individuals living with quadriplegia in the U.S. However, globally, with conditions like Muscular Dystrophy, SMA, ALS, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, stroke aftermath, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and other SRIs, the number of potential users is vast.

Beyond assistive use, we’ve also attracted developers intrigued by the productivity gains from hands-free interfacing and the prospect of an always-available, private AI+AR interaction interface.

Know anyone who might benefit from the MouthPad? Join our waitlist: https://augmental.tech/waitlist

We make stingray resistant booties! Stingray stings are painful and can be dangerous, and the fear of getting stung can take the enjoyment out of the beach. We’ve mainly targeted surfers so far, but they could be useful for any beach-goer.

Definitely been dealing with the fact that “hardware is hard”. We had a design we were fairly happy with about two years ago, but have been struggling to get it manufactured since then. We’re making progress, but it’s always slow.

Our website is www.mydragonskin.com

Steve Irwin's death[0] has never not been on my mind anytime a stingray gets near me. I'm like "hey little fella, I'm going to slowly back away to avoid both of us freaking out and one of us may end up dead."

Best of luck with your startup!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Irwin

How often do you find yourself near a stingray?

Thanks!

Just for posterity: Steve Irwin’s death was really very unusual. Stingrays can be scary, but deaths directly due to stingray stings are pretty rare. Contaminated wounds are more common and can lead to serious issues, but even that is not normal. We’ve met multiple people who’ve gotten 10+ stings, but I only know one person who had serious issues due to contamination.

Is there any interest in your company on making the same thing for pets, or at least dogs? My pops takes his dog surfing most days, and there are lots and lots of urchins around. The extra safety would be nice.

We have a few ideas for follow-on products, but haven’t been able to put much time into them yet. I’ll add this to the list though, and we’ll look into it eventually!

Assuming that a wet-suit does not help with such bites, would it be feasible to make a full-body suit from the same material?

I'm a layman (or worse) in this area, and I was wondering if somethings similar could be made for shark bites.

After Googling, I found someone claiming that they have.

How hard would would it be to "combine these two"?

(Both of the above may be stupid questions)

These are great questions!

Shaping something for the whole body would be difficult, because most puncture resistant materials aren’t very stretchy. You’d have to have the perfect shape for a specific person. It probably is possible, but likely to take a lot of work and be rather uncomfortable.

Doing some quick googling, I find sharkstop.co, which makes wetsuits to protect against shark attacks. They say the “placement of Shark Stop panels … have been strategically chosen to significantly reduce the amount of blood lost during a shark bite incident…” It sounds like they’re carefully choosing the location to make trade offs between protection and wearability, which I suspect is the right approach. We do the same thing with our booties, and only have stingray resistant material covering some percentage of the bootie.

Where does one need to live to have this problem? I’ve been to the Gulf of Mexico countless times and I’ve literally never seen a stingray. I’m guessing they’re not native there?

I live in Gulf Breeze FL on the Gulf of Mexico and see stingrays daily.

There should be stingrays in the Gulf of Mexico, but you might not have seen them for a couple of reasons:

- They generally blend in well with the ocean floor

- Some species bury themselves to hide when they feel threatened, others swim away

- They prefer warm, shallow, sandy beaches — if you’re at a beach with lots of rocks/seaweed, they might not be there

I'm head of engineering at a local kiosk company (www.advancedkiosks.com) and we are doing fun things with very little resources! We recently implemented Google MediaPipe for presence detection. That was fun. We use custom printed microcontroller boards to control certain peripherals like LED strips and fans. We design in 3D print our own brackets. Things like that. The job requires a lot of creativity and knitting together of technologies. Pretty good fun. Beats writing yet another distributed CRUD SaaS app...though we do have a couple of those. I don't know if my employer qualifies as a startup, but we're pretty small and doing cool things.

So cool, and I love all the mentions of "fun" :-)

I remember implementing a "kiosk" but the way my employer wanted it was a full screen electron/react app running on a windows server. It was such a pain working around windows to grab full screen, start a GUI application and so on... all the while I kept thinking, this could be a "simple" Qt/QML app running on frame buffer on an RPI! Heck, we could even customize the startup screen, and it would be easily a magnitude faster with 1/100 the hardware!

That surprised me also. We ended up writing a window manager application to force the kiosk UI window to always be on top and I up front...even after all the registry edits. So, yup, I feel you there!

https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~gogo/humor/hum_toast.html

This made me laugh as my soul shriveled from the memories of codebases I’ve worked with

:’-)

I’m surprised at how some software companies actually survive!

I'm building trading cards made with e-ink displays.

https://www.wyldcard.io/blog/introducing-wyldcard

https://www.crowdsupply.com/wyldcard/wyldcard-devkit

I had an idea that you might be able to build, now that I see 'you' again:

Would you ever design an E-Ink "Life and token counter" aimed at people who play Commander format MTG? Given the amount of time and effort it would take me to DIY, I'd easily pay $50ish for a standalone device of the type.

Seconding this, then I wouldn’t have to use my phone all the time.

I remember reading your post about this on HN a while back. You are creating some sick tech. Hope you can blow up.

Just a one man show for now but this is my current side project:

https://www.tesotaoverland.com/product/apds

The idea is that this replaces a many of the components you'd normally use to build out a 12V electrical system for a van or 4wd truck. Just plug everything in to the WAGO connectors, no bus bars, fuse blocks or difficult crimp connections required.

Nifty!! Good luck :)

Something that can handle those kinds of amps and had a simple low-voltage cut off would be amazing (I'm thinking using them for abuse of power tool batteries, which normally don't have a cutoff in them).

There are weird adjustable ones on eBay but they're not terribly reliable and seem to not handle larger amperages.

This would've been so nice when I was rebuilding an RV. I had converted nearly everything to 12V(before Dell & IBM did charger authentication) and ended up with little 12V fused distribution blocks everywhere.

Sweet!

I want the same thing plus current and voltage monitoring and the ability to shutdown certain circuits. I have a design for a wifi (or bt) operated 1000A relay to disconnect the starting and the house batteries.

You may have seen this already but the Redarc RedVision system might be more in line with your use case:

https://www.redarcelectronics.com/us/redvision

Thank you!

We make edge AI cameras. After focusing on services for a while, it has been a different type of journey to switch to the product. We did an open source pilot product on esp32, and got surprisingly more interest than we thought, so now we are working on a high performance (4k, 60fps, AI chip) device.

Lite-esp32 camera https://www.crowdsupply.com/maxlab/tokay-lite Source-code: https://github.com/maxlab-io/tokay-lite-pcb

Pro camera updats will be posted here: https://maxlab.io/store/tokay-riscv-camera/

How do these compare to the Luxonis cameras? https://www.luxonis.com/

Not OP, but I'm very familiar with both.

Luxonis is way more powerful and has an Intel VPU (Movidius). It's not really meant to be a standalone platform, so it needs a host board (Linux SBC like the Pi). It takes a lot more power, but it can do 60fps on small Yolo models. Its resolution is a lot higher as well.

ESP32-S3 has a pretty small memory capacity, and doesn't have H264-H265 hardware encoding, so you'll be on low-res, low-fps. It only does MJPEG (AFAIK) streaming, so you'll also have to deal with high latency if you want to send that data somewhere. The big bonus is that it's low-cost and low-power, and you're running it directly on the core without an OS.

This means you can do stuff like sleep the cores until something wakes it up (like a PIR sensor that detects people), and it will start streaming in a second or two.

TL;DR: Luxonis stronk, but needs big batteries or plugged in. ESP32-S3 can run on small batteries or solar.

Ngl I really wish Luxonis cameras supported running standalone after being configured once, OpenVino is such a heckin chonker to install and manage.

The ESP32-P4 has hardware accelerators for media-encoding, including H.264. Might want to check it out.

Is it out yet?

I'm desperately waiting for it to be available.

Since they announced it half a year ago I would have expected engineering samples to be available by now, but there is nothing.

Could you please clarify what you mean by ‘AI’?

By "AI" here I mean cameras that support running machine vision models directly on the device. We provide the device and firmware, and then on the application and model level it is up to the user.

We are building a cyber foundry in Los Angeles to reshore American manufacturing. Using in-house composites, Rangeview 3D prints highly complex ceramic parts and pours molten metal into them autonomously. Our process can make components with material and geometric specifications no other metalic manufacturing process is capable of. We have worked with Rivian, Boeing, Airbus, and are aiming for military spares for planes like the F22. The founding team met doing VEX, FRC and Battlebots. https://rangeview.co/

Very cool. Are these investment casts? Or are they reusable?

Investment castings, we break the mold off and recycle the ceramic. That way you don't need draft angles or other limitations.

How does the ceramic recycling process work? I'm guessing just crushing and heating the ceramic does a decent job of separation, but there has to be some level of impurity leftover. Is there enough pressure in the casting process that you'd be worried about localized weakness in the tool?

That sounds very cool.

I have to ask - do you build parts for your machines using your machines?

Of course, all good additive companies do

We're working on "life support systems" for algae photobioreactors. This includes monitoring the health of the algae, monitoring and controlling the environment to optimise algae growth, providing feedback to users on growth and experiment progress, and uploading data to our own cloud.

We're more software than hardware, but without the hardware capability we wouldn't have been able to attempt it.

Previously we tried little "Singing Christmas Trees" as well [0], and while they were certainly nifty, we couldn't find the market for them at the price.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@pixolighting

Do you recall the game(?) 'LIGHT BRIGHT'

Which consisted of a black-cardboard-paper with a pattern on it connect-the-dots-style - and you would plug into each 'dot' a plastic pin, then it would light-up at you would see the pattern/design in full form?

Imagine your xmas trees as a grid of LEDs and they are pressable/de-pressable (toggle) and kids can draw out a pattern, then have the machine animate the pattern in certain ways... as it understands the intent of the drawing as being a car/tree/person/animal whatever...

We did look at the idea of letting people arbitrarily arrange a string of LEDs then somehow map the sub-models to the new positions (which LEDs are "left eye open", which are "mouth shape E", etc.), but we couldn't find an LED string we liked that was both cheap and individually-addressable.

Also on the drawing board was some sort of "tiles" of letters which would be be rearranged by the user and illuminated in a fixed grid, then have different messages light up like a wordsearch. It could also be used to make those "word clocks" that are out there, that spell out "it is half past four" for example.

That's super cool! I worked last year on an algae bioreactor. I was growing chlorella in plastic bottles in my room, just for the heck of it. That year I also met some people working for a University of Edinburgh startup using algae to consume the tails from whiskey production. Honestly, I really hope that algaes see a wider adoption in consumer and business processes, because they're really fun and fascinating organisms.

Out of curiosity, are you looking for interns? I can work in the UK and the US. If you have contact information of some kind, I can send you my resume!

That sounds really interesting. I'm afraid we're not looking for interns immediately, but the next phase of the project will require more people and square-footage. My email's in my profile, let me know!

Small company - but we've have been building tools for Guitarists, centered around our LED display system. https://www.fretzealot.com

Personally in charge of hardware, firmware, and too many of the things behind the scenes. About to crowdfund our V2 with hugely improved hardware and LEDs.

Covid was fun with MCU shortages and years lead time, so now that we've survived that things are looking brighter.

Some people like it just for the light shows, but we get lots of great feedback across the board.

Been rewarding to build a tool that I actually get to use and benefit from on more-or-less a daily basis.

Wow this is great, thanks for sharing!

Space robotics, trying to build the Caterpillar of construction and maintenance on orbit. Not a lot to show yet but that’s unsurprising because it takes quite a while to get this sort of thing built up to the point where your printing prototypes or bending metal, and it’s along road from there to putting anything into orbit.

Didn’t make the cut for YC Summer 2023, looking forward to applying again with 6 more months of development progress…

Any thought given to the fact that every startup in the past decade that attempted in-orbit manufacturing failed or had massive trouble?

I’m sure they haven’t thought about it at all /s

Seriously, what kind of question is this? The entire point of engineering is to try things that are new or have not previously been done. Do you think SpaceX gave a lot of thought to prior failures around reusability?

My point is that all these companies over the years made grand proclamations until they hit the hard reality that manufacturing in space is either not feasible, not economic, not possible or too complicated. I am skeptical at this point.

Yep. It’s why we’re not focusing on manufacturing. There’s plenty of demand for maintenance like the life extension services based on getting maximum value from existing hardware on orbit, Lockheed Martin have sold several Mission Extension Vehicles and that’s just the tip of the iceberg for that market. There’s other factors such that make now the time, contracts and money changing hands for commercial space stations, with two firmly underway with a third looking promising and two more potential ones from legitimately capable companies just not yet past the point where it’s clear construction will take place. All sorts of stuff can last longer and have better ROI for owners and operators if suitable maintenance can be performed on it.

We make a system for assisting self-evacuation from tunnels using directional sound effects:

https://norphonic.com/products/evacsound/

Most of the userspace work including the planner, fire detection, resource scheduling and distributed execution is done in Common Lisp.

Fascinating. Our Volvo does this for backing up and getting warnings from sensors. It uses the individual speakers from the direction of the issue. Works great.

Yep it's really nice augmentation. In a tunnel there are challenges though which aren't an issue in a compartment. The effects have to work for any person in miles long tunnels, with reverb/echo times in multiple seconds. They have to read off even with the noise from smoke extraction fans. Plus the practicalities of synchronized distributed operation, dealing with battle damage/attrition etc.

uhm, I need to introduce you to someone, who has developed this into a patented delivery via a baseball cap (hat) bill with directional indicators via LED to give you wayfinding HUD without a screen....

There's been lots of such ideas floating (and patented). But no evacuation method that relies on a motorist having any device or app on them is feasible.

No - this is to integrate into the fire fighters helmets. Telling them routes, supply caches, other team members... and they turn their head and get wayfinding directionals based on color RGBs in hat...

www.sentineldevices.com

We use machine learning to monitor industrial equipment for signs of faults or failures, and identify in real-time which signals are relevant to the failure/which ones a technician should look at first. The problem we're solving is that when a machine fails unexpectedly, 60% or more of a technician's time is spent just figuring out what was going on and what, specifically, went wrong. We want to cut that time by half or more by having our device be an engineer-in-a-box monitoring the equipment 24/7/365. We're also unique in that we're "zero-cloud" - we do all data collection, storage & processing (yes, even the AI training - not just inference) on-device, on a COTS hardware platform that fits in your hand. The idea is to be truly plug-and-play without having to figure out network infrastructure, and cybersecurity, and data storage costs, etc. etc. Demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhtLS3UfnPU&feature=youtu.be

We're always interested in pilots; our website is admittedly fairly stealth mode, but if you know someone that works at a factory, they can reach out to forrest.shriver@sentineldevices.com

I work on software at a hardware startup that is designing and manufacturing a next-generation electrolysis plant for the production of green hydrogen. My personal experience has led me to believe that opportunities to participate meaningfully in climate tech are exclusively available at hardware companies. Anyone attempting to solve climate change with software is at best skimming value off of the work being done by others in the physical world, and at worst creating markets for corporate greenwashing.

Please contact me, see link in profile.

This sounds like great tech. Keep at it for the benefit of all of us.

> Anyone attempting to solve climate change with software is at best skimming value off of the work being done by others in the physical world, and at worst creating markets for corporate greenwashing.

I fully agree with this assessment and I would love to hear more about your product.

I've see so a lot of jobs popping up related to SaaS for compliance right now, so things like helping companies stay on top of regulation and track their own efforts and initiatives. I do get the impression that a lot of it is done sincerely, but it does have a hint of ye olde 'selling shovels in a gold rush'.

Still, if it keeps people out of adtech and cryptocurrency it seems like a win.

how do you sell shovels in a gold rush insincerely?

Perhaps if the gold rush is a scam? But if it is real, then it is honest work.

All the easy gold has been dug up, and shovels are no longer practical.

It's sincere if you tell people that you sell shovels. It's insincere if you tell people that you will make all their prospecting dreams come true.

Any prominent examples?

I was recently laid off from a climate tech software company, and one of my former colleagues and I are now working on hardware appliances, solving the problems that our previous company’s software “enabled” other people to solve.

At best, climate tech software makes the necessary hardware cheaper and more effective, or provides important data, but pure software plays in climate tech should be considered greenwashing scams until proven innocent.

Could you elaborate with examples? What about software companies offering data to correct these trends ( with tools) say utility

> Anyone attempting to solve climate change with software is at best skimming value off of the work being done by others in the physical world

With respect - I bet a dollar that the folk at Zoom have done more to reduce automotive pollution than your startup. No hardware startup could have enabled WFH in the absence of calendar, messaging & video conference software.

This is a fantastic point, but Zoom would never have been a candidate for me personally for several reasons:

- As important as reducing our use of fossil fuels is, using less energy is not a solution to the problem of a non-renewable energy system. In that sense, it wouldn't meet the criteria for someone who wants to work on a climate solution.

- While WFH drastically reduces auto emissions, it increases gas & electricity use in the home.

- Zoom is not a mission-driven company and (to my knowledge) their KPIs are not directed at or correlated with their GHG footprint; I would think they see themselves as productivity software, not climate software.

- If Zoom never existed we would be working from home at the same rate, using any of hundreds of other video conferencing apps. In carbon offset terms, their impact does not provide additionality.

Having worked in climate tech for a few years and also following the VCs in that space intently, I believe you've completely nailed it. Seriously, this comment is worth two trillion dollars.

https://oxide.computer looks great

Basically my dream job

I don't really understand what they're making and what differentiates their product. Is it a private cloud but designed so you can just drop it in place and turn it on instead of having to set up the cloud?

It's server racks with basically iLO on steroids.

To be fair, simply being server a company that's easy to deal with is enough of a differentiator in this space. Would absolutely blindly buy from them just to avoid having to deal with HPE/Dell

I understood that company to be Supermicro, though I've never dealt with them so I could be wrong.

>To be fair, simply being server a company that's easy to deal with is enough of a differentiator in this space. Would absolutely blindly buy from them just to avoid having to deal with HPE/Dell

I'm in the server business (within a very specific niche). I wish I could find more people like you.

We have talked quite a bit about what it's like to be making hardware as a startup in our Oxide and Friends podcast[0] -- and one might be especially interested in the Q&A we did on Monday[1] after our launch got quite a bit of attention here on HN.[2]

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P5Mk_IggE0

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552015

We've built Matic - A privacy-preserving autonomous home robot

5.5 years ago, we started building an autonomous home robot with these goals:

* Reliable autonomy — no user interventions, it should just work * Everything on device — no cloud storage or compute, robot-to-app data through local WiFi * Usefulness — solve a genuine problem that will impact real people

To achieve this, we * wrote the robot's software stack in Rust * used only RGB cameras and Mics as input — humans can navigate with only these sensors, so why can’t a robot? * developed SLAM and computer vision algorithms that run on-device, in real time, with centimeter-level precision and semantic understanding * gave our robot a purpose — starting with floor cleaning allowing us to develop specialized hardware for vacuuming and mopping w/o chewing up wires or getting stuck.

We're a small team of <60 people singularly focused on building something that we’ve all dreamed about: a mobile indoor robot that solves a real problem without jeopardizing our privacy. We're still developing Matic and iterating, but we’re proud of what we’ve built so far.

Let us know what you'd be interested to learn! We'll also answer questions here and look forward to your feedback :)

https://matician.com/

Wow, this is really cool. The pricing is way above my budget, but I can see the market for a premium device like this- if it really does what it looks like it does. The “point and tell” demo is particularly amazing.

Great homepage, by the way- makes it very easy to tell what the robot can do (and I appreciated the FAQ).

The $75/month ($900/year) price tag is quite steep, but between the feature set, the intelligence built into the device, and the free repairs and replacements, I think this provides a lot of value for homeowners. I subscribed to your email list. Good luck!

We make physical advertising (DOOH) with real time bidding. If you have an image you want to advertise you just submit it and select the screens/locations where you'd like to end up and choose what you want to pay. Then we approve and rate your ad and if you are the highest bidder (ad quality is part of the equation too) you can end up on the screen right then.

The whole process can take 20 minutes, from signup to your ad being shown in businesses versus weeks to months for traditional advertising.

Also the minimum payment is only 20$. We have all sorts of non-profits, local bands, anything you can think of, on the network. I think we have the lowest barrier of entry of the industry.

https://oa.media/en/

If you'd like to discuss my email is in my profile.

The first button looks like a button but doesn't go anywhere. Other buttons took me to pages in another language.

I'm on it.

We are developing an innovative one-piece 3D printed travel guitar designed to fit into a suitcase while maintaining regular tuning. Our instrument incorporates a hollow neck acting as a resonance body, making it unique in the market. Unlike other guitars, our design eliminates the need for assembly before playing. However, this poses a significant challenge due to the immense tension it must withstand. You may check it at https://minicorda.com

Not a hardware startup per-se, but we are ex-satellite engineers who out if frustration with available tooling have developed the engineering software every hardware engineer deserves: https://www.valispace.com

Also just released the first hardware engineering ai assistant: https://youtu.be/uLEOPpqiUok

OP said “hardware”.

This is meaningfully hardware adjacent, stop being a stick in the mud.

Stop allowing irrelevant comments in a thread that clearly says "hardware" startup.

It’s clearly not low effort or irrelevant, chill out with the thread policing.

Oh sweet, hey Valispace. I can vouch for this software as a spacecraft integrator. I worked with it a few years back as part of a trial and the power of inputing real world hardware measurements of equipment back into a system and see the impact of the measurements system wide is very powerful.

While it is aimed at the spacecraft industry, I can see any industry with concurrent engineering taking advantage of this sort of system.

I have found this software to be very unintuitive with bad UI/UX, unfortunately. The utility of the software is good amd it fills a vital gap for concurrent engineering, but UI/UX needs to be improved badly.

I work for a hardware startup in NYC and HK called Looking Glass (www.lookingglassfactory.com). We create light field displays. Coming from a primarily software background, I quite agree that hardware is harder. We are venture funded but we are very lean due to the challenges of bootstrapping a display business and the capital requirements needed for manufacturing. We only have about 10 software engineers that are split across plugins, drivers, firmware, production tooling, our web platform, and solutions development. On the bright side, the technology presents extremely interesting problems.

I actually had our chief innovation officer pick up a screen from you guys out in NY a few years back. I love your tech and wish you the best of luck

Thanks!

We are making computer controlled microscopes more accessible: better software and lower cost. We are working on tightly integrating output images with cloud services (ex: AI analysis, data viewers) to make the data more usable. We also have FOSS Python host software that enables a lot of user customization. We rely on a lot more COTS components and software correction than traditional players to keep the cost low (ex: we use mass produced chassis instead of designing our own).

https://www.labsmore.com/

My ask for HN: pricing is hard and I'd love to talk to other hardware co-founders about their experience / advice. One complication is that pricing is affected based on how we make money (ex: are we selling more hardware vs cloud services). Or please reach out if you just like microscopes :) Always great to talk to more people!

Pricing is definitely hard. Something we're testing out and learning about right now. Luckily we do have a subscription model too which can give us some flexibility. I'm happy to chat. My email is in my bio.

Thanks! Will reach out soon

It's a side income, as the market is way to small to make it a full time thing, but I've designed a digital score card for tabletop wargaming, with relevant tokens for each game (starting with the Warhammer franchises, Bolt Action, BattleTech, Marvel Crisis, Star Wars Legion, Malifaux, and ASOIAF). It's basically a few 7-seg displays, and buttons to tick them up or down, and smaller ones for wound tracking on specific models. The main draw is the different cases depending what army/faction you're playing, which you can paint to match your color scheme. I've yet to scale it beyond my local clubs and the occasional tournament, but feedback thus far has been great. Website on its way, with a Kickstarter in progress so I can hire a designer to help me we the casing. Also selling STLs so people can 3D print their own.

Man, that sounds friggin awesome

I'll go ahead and cyberstalk you, haha.

Aspinity, Inc. https://www.aspinity.com/

We're a semiconductor startup working on ultra-low power programmable analog devices.

We're always looking to hire.

We need expertise in the following areas: analog design, semiconductor production and test, embedded systems, ML model development and infrastructure, digital/analog signal processing, PCB design and test, analog circuit simulation, compiler infrastructure, SDK development and more.

Software we use: Rust, C, Python, PyTorch.

Email me directly at nicolas@aspinity.com to connect. We're based in Pittsburgh.

I'm building an open source water meter to detect costly water leaks and track your water usage. The hardware design is flexible enough to easily repurpose it for measuring residential gas and electricity meters, as well as any signal that requires continuous reading while maintaining a long battery life.

https://y-drip.com

Follow the development process here:

https://hackaday.io/project/191398-ydrip

Wow! Would love to compare this to Flume! Been using it for some time but can’t quite catch one tiny leak I have

Interesting. Do you mean the leak is intermittent and Flume isn't able to detect it? I would love to know more.

Leak is happening every other day, sometimes twice a day. Flume detects it but I can’t find the source of the leak in the house. For many months now. Wondering if this is some bad reading or something else.

Strange. That's one of the reasons my leak threshold is customizable. My city water meter has an LED that turns on when it detects a leak, but I've never seen it work.

We're building an AI tool and die maker. Never officially launched on HN but was YC W21 (https://atomic.industries). I would argue this is one of the most challenging intersections of software and hardware in the world. We are building a vertically integrated system that can design and fabricate tooling (injection molds, etc).

Consider broadening your scope. Your offering appears to target a manufacturing stage where it its value-add is relatively capped: since tools, materials and processes are already specified. While generative specification of mould assemblies is powerful, we all know fabrication is the main pain point. Other process geometries such as jigs and fixtures can be similarly critical and deliver more value more quickly and this leads in to questions of flow (handling/storage/palletizing), even machine tool worktable systems.

Huge amounts of money are routinely lost on poor process investments due to invisible process alternatives. Be any part of a general solution there, and you're at the table before a factory is built, when it has resource allocation questions, to tune maintenance processes, or when it needs new revenue streams.

While it's hard to be all things to all people, simply having an integrated offering with an MVP in each major process engineering zone will help immensely. It's certainly more than the big players have tabled (who are addicted to consulting on the status quo), and would therefore set you up well for acquisition.

We did (and still do) indoor localization (essentially GPS for indoor spaces). We started off building our own hardware and during the prototyping phase, we built a quad-channel software defined radio: https://github.com/fzliu/osdr-q10

My 2¢: don't do a hardware startup. Iteration cycles are long and expensive, funding is minimal, and if you're successful you'll be squeezed out of the market by giants such as Intel.

Alternate pov: hardware lacks the kind of off-the-shelf tooling that software has developed, so engineers/founders feel like they have to develop a lot of non-critical things in-house. I'd argue most startups would be better off ruthlessly prioritising requirements and using poorer, off-the-shelf components, and building their advantage at the software-hardware intersection

I own multiple interactive entertainment concepts. We build room scale hardware and props. So definitely a bit different than normal consumer hardware, but still have a lot of the same problems. One of our issues is we our low volume and unique use cases for our hardware.

I’d love to connect with anyone else doing similar things. My info is in my bio.

Breakoutgames.Com Activate.games

This is really cool! I've seen some videos of these and I'm jealous they're so far away.

What sort of issues do you have? Is the hardware very custom?

It seems like a concept that could explode as a franchise or even template model like escape rooms a few years back.

We're building Hoopfit, the most advanced basketball shooting machine ever.

It's battery powered and ultra portable so it can be used in your driveway hoop or you can take it to the park. It's powered by iPad Air so we heavily leverage the cameras for computer vision and AI to automatically track a players shooting stats and provide real time feedback on shooting form.

I'm a software engineer but I have to admit, designing and building a physical product is so rewarding and a ton of fun :)

It's the product I wish I had as a kid and desperately need as a recreational hooper trying to continue playing basketball as I get older!

https://gethoopfit.com

How will you price it relative to a dr dish?

They have so many different models so it depends which model you compare it to :) We'll be competitive if not cheaper. We're still finalizing manufacturing and figuring out pricing but will likely need to start at a higher price and lower volume.

for sure no one is carrying a dr dish around with them. Good luck!

Loads of hardware startups, but the communities are not in the Bay, Seattle or NYC.

Most of the activity is not being generated by Americans or in America. Lots are being started in India, Dubai and China. Even the ones based out of the US or Singapore spend most of their time in Shenzen.

In the US, I routinely see robotics and Healthcare hardware startups in Boston or San Diego, pseudo attached to the local university. No surprise that irobot and Boston dynamics are based out of Boston.

I think there is a huge hardware startup ecosystem in the bay, I'm part of it. Especially for certain hardware specialties like medical,semiconductor, defence, space, etc.

Another consideration is that a lot of hardware startups focus on industrial applications with customers that don't operate out of tech hubs.

There are tons of small companies making hardware for oil & gas applications, but you'll mostly find them in areas where their customers are located (e.g. Texas, Alberta) and/or LCOL cities where you can find cheap real estate. This also applies to other industries like agriculture and automotive.

These aren't "sexy" companies so you don't hear much about them, but I'd wager that if you add them up, they'd outnumber the number of hardware startups in NYC and the Bay Area.

Where do you find these companies? I imagine crunchbase isn’t the best spot

Unfortunately I don't think there's a good way to find these companies unless you happen to live near them or work in the industry they sell to.

In my experience, they normally get started and funded by local people in their industry and they sell back to local customers (at least initially) from their network, so there's very little in the way of advertising, especially at a national level. Also, they often hire from their network for early positions and local colleges/universities as they grow, so you might not even see them on job boards.

If you're looking for companies that are a bit more established, you could try industry trade shows.

> Even the ones based out of the US or Singapore spend most of their time in Shenzen

Agree. Lived in SG for 14 years, worked for hardware startups for 8 of those. There really isn't much going on HW wise.

My experience has been that if you work with the government on a project, as if by magic, ST Engineering comes up with a competing product within 1-2 years.

We're working on riderless and balance-assisted bicycles and motorcycles. We're working to ship our flagship bike and we're about to launch a balance-bike for kids that helps them learn faster and sets up virtual bumpers while they learn.

Cool video of moto carrying stuff (just like the 2016 google prank vid) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sqyjag9yRUA

You should track down the one-man team from the first DARPA Grand Challenge who made an autonomous motorcycle. I was on a team with a real truck, so I didn't have to figure out how to balance a two-wheeled vehicle while also trying to figure out how to autonomously make it through an obstacle course. From an insiders view, we all thought he was the star of the show.

> the one-man team

Pretty sure there were several engineers (engineering students) involved

This will sound like a joke, but that was Anthony Levandowski

Holy shit I never put that together. He was always just tinkering in his garage by himself as far as I remembered. We had a lot of bugs in our truck (like everyone) so we would get burned out and walk around and talk to each other. There was a lot of sharing with the smaller teams. Way later I realized I had a long conversation with Sebastian Thrun about how we did our throttle feedback actuator. He was lucky to have a drive-by-wire SUV and we were all mechanical. Those were super fun times hanging out at the raceway for trials those first two years.

Not a start-up but a non-profit.

I'm the vice chair at Libre Space Foundation (https://libre.space).We create open-source space technologies. Some of our projects:

- SatNOGS rotator: an azimuth/elevation rotator for directional antennas.

- UPSat: 1st cubesat build under open source hardware licenses that got in orbit (design deprecated)

- SatNOGS-COMM: next gen communications module for CubeSats

- QUBIK: even smaller pico-satellites that got also in orbit in Oct 22

- PICOBUS: pico-satellite deployer also in orbit Oct 22

- SIDLOC: a spacecraft location and identification beacon protocol and hardware, will be on the last stage of the Ariane 6 inaugural launch.

I'm loving your scope, any plans to (say) add support for 'at home' garden shed cameras to add to the global fireballs network ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Fireball_Network

https://fireballs.ndc.nasa.gov/

https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2005SASS...24...11K

Not currently, but maybe in the future.:)

At Sense we make a home energy monitor that provides real-time appliance-level monitoring using machine learning. Hardware is indeed hard as everyone said it would be!

https://sense.com

This seems exactly like neurio, but Generac seems to have shuttered that product.

That seems.... really expensive?

$165 will get you an emporia with 16 sensors so you don't need any AI trying to decipher your usage, compared to $300 for yours that only gives you sensors for your main feed.

Considering it's trivial to find schematics online showing how to wire a clamp current meter into an esp32, what have you found to be difficult about the hardware? I would expect the AI detection of individual appliances would be the hard part.

Glad to see Sense here! Been using it for 3+ years and am surprised how good it detects electrical appliances and other typical stuff.

Do you have any plans regarding always on load? So hard to track it down…

I'm currently working on an Audio/Midi Recorder/Arranger for musicians/songwriters. Admittedly it's not a Startup, I rather aim to make it a SMB some day. And yes, hardware is hard. Especially for me as a Software Engineer by trade.

Track8 started when I wanted to learn Rust 3 years ago. It somehow evolved into a product.

https://www.thingstone.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8u0Z55G2-0

I saw your design and it's fascinating. The whole concept of writing without distractions is really awesome. Good luck!

Took me awhile to remember what it was called, but TinyPilot [^0] by mtlynch is pretty cool. Michael sometimes writes about running a hardware business on his blog [^1].

Not exactly a startup, but a small business.

[^0]: https://tinypilotkvm.com

[^1]: https://mtlynch.io/posts

Is TinyPilot hardware - it looks more like software?

Yes: https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-voyager2a

Seems like currently the competitors to this product are the Pi-KVM and the Blikvm.

Seems like Blikvm have a number of interesting form factors, such as PCIe card and rack mount, which may be interesting to those looking into this space

We're trialing TinyPilot right now at my employer. They're very easy to work with and are willing to work with small companies to find new use cases.

1080p makes it a total non-starter for me, that sort of resolution is over a decade out of date, even for small laptops. Not sure why people think it's an acceptable maximum.

I use 1080p everyday... on purpose. How else am I going to get 144+ FPS when gaming?

Maximum. :)

I drop down to 1080p myself when gaming on weak computers, but I generally use 4k for clarity because I stare at code for many hours each day (sometimes more than 16). So I would definitely want the capability to stream 4k if I'm reading text, browsing the web, etc.

We make tiny Linux servers packed with real devops tools (but also sporting a somewhat-easy-ish-to-use UI) for home-hosting and self-teaching: https://pibox.io - works great with Jellyfin!

Two big 'ole thumbs up for Kubesail and the Pibox! Been running mine since November of 2022 and it's great. As a complete novice I was able to self-host Jellyfin, Bitwarden, Nextcloud, Resilio Sync, and Flatnotes pretty much all in a few minutes. The Pibox is great, and the folks at Kubesail are wonderful.

I'll look into purchasing one. My Jellyfin system drive failed on an old Dell Optiplex. I just need to replace and re-image the hdd, but this looks fun. Is it well ventilated?

It does have a small noctua fan which is usually overkill, and several users have added low profile heatsinks. I don’t have any heat problems and mine are stacked in a big pile :P

thumbs up

MAJOR two thumbs up on this one - the pibox is a very cool product, great for learning, easy to deploy on, and powerful enough for smaller tasks. the Kubesail folks are responsive (both in email and on their Discord server). Couldn't be happier!

We are building autonomous heavy construction machinery based on almost a decade of research from ETH Zurich. Automating an industry that has seen little disruption in the last 50 years and suffers a labour shortage is the perfect opportunity.

https://gravisrobotics.com

Tillitis AB

Our first product is the TKey - a new kind of USB security key - which we have been selling since May. TKey is very likely the most open source USB security key in the world, as well as the first one to feature unconditional measured boot, which we use as a method for key derivation.

Tillitis AB is a sister company of Mullvad VPN AB and Glasklar Teknik AB.

How does this compare to an onlykey?

How does this compare with Librem Key?

Note: This reply is primarily copied from another comment I made comparing the TKey to another key.

I'm sure kfreds can provide a far more in-depth answer, but unlike the Librem Key, which (seems to) stores information locally that is then accessed and passed along to a device, there is no way of storing an application (or any other data) on a TKey. Rather, a device app must be loaded onto the TKey every time you plug it in.

Since each TKey device contains a Unique Device Secret, alongside it generating a hash of the application binary, and accepting an optional user-provided seed, it can derive key material unique to each application. If the exact same application and user-seed are provided each time, the application will return the same result.

This is, for example, how one can use the TKey for signing files and SSH. The generated public/private key pair will always be the same, without requiring any data to be stored.

Going back to your question, some of the differences include that: The TKey allows you to program and use your own applications, the TKey is fully open source (both HW and FW), there are no limits on the number of services the TKey can be used for, and the TKey uses USB C (meaning one can for example use it with a smartphone).

Note: This is a pretty basic description of the TKey, there's far more to it, but it should explain some of the difference!

//Disclosure: I currently work at Tillitis.

I run 2 small IoT startups.

One is smart agriculture related, we do ambient and soil moisture sensors https://pycno.co

Second, (from the learnings of the first one) offers a smart IoT gateway (cellular, WiFi,LoRa, etc.) with modular cartridges (like SNES) for connecting sensors and actuators from any 3rd party vendor https://deeporbital.com

Seems very niche May I ask how you got in this venture?

Totally random, wanted to do home automation first but it wasn't a big pain for customers (it was a nice to have) and the market was very crowded.

Started talking with agriculture companies and just developed whatever they wanted (HW/SW). Agriculture is a slower moving industry, which gave us time to learn from our plethora of mistakes.

At the end of the day, home automation or agriculture, both needed some measuring, uploading and graphing of data.

I worked for a home automation kind of thing a few years back and... it's hard. The part I worked on in software was fun, but it's just so difficult to deal with the lead times and difficulty of updating things and doing customer service.

More power to you if you're making a go of it.

Years ago, I worked on these, and it was so much fun, because of the variety of (smart) people involved, from tracing the light rays through the machine to motors, firmware, and all the rest. https://www.icare-world.com/us/product/icare-eidon/

We’re early stage, just fundraising now, but we’re working on building the first generation of molecular nanotechnology devices for machine-phase chemistry and the construction of gemstone-based nano machinery.

We’re interested in talking to people of all backgrounds who want to make Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology a near-term reality. Send us an email: hello@machinephase.systems

I've been working on a modular vacuum cleaner robot for around 5 years:

https://wolley.se

I have done it in my spare time but the dream is to be able to sell it as a kit and work on it full time.

Awesome. I had a similar idea. Maybe we could join forces one day?...

I thought about hacking and modding existing robots (I have one at home that has great hardware, but the software is terrible!).

Definitely set up a Liberapay account to get support (if you need economic support), although I guess most people would want to see proof of concept first.

One thing that would be great is to crowdsource the software, and maybe the training data for ML. The open source community got together and made the top chess and go engines with community GPU training, why not do the same for robot vacuums?

Good luck! :)

Thanks! Sure, there's a lot of more work to do, especially the software for the "brain". I have mostly focused on the mechanics and electronics since that's the most exciting/new for me.

I will in a couple of months have a skeleton/chassi finished and then the "only" thing left is to write the software to make it autonomous. The idea is to keep it really simple in the beginning and let it run on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. Using a Raspberry Pi opens up the platform for more people and software.

Yes, I would want to have something that works fine before starting to sell components, parts or accepting donations etc.

Side note:

People here often say that hardware is hard, but I think OSHW has the upside of de-risking it too (although I might be somewhat biased in my enthusiastic support of OSHW). If other people are producing it (from 3d printing at home to commercial manufacturing), you don't have manufacturing risks at all. The large costs and difficulty involved are probably mostly around manufacturing. Also by extending the development phase and working closely with customers you can find a product-market fit more naturally (and iterate if it fails... or just abandon it, I guess). If all goes wrong you've contributed an open source project...

The hard part of course in that case is convincing your users and any company that decides to manufacture your hardware to pay you. But not unheard of, see LumenPNP (https://opulo.io/products/lumenpnp)

My dream is a completely (or almost completely) open society, where most development is open and people collaborate more or less freely, and we have good mechanisms (and enough good sense individually?) to reward and invest in all this work.

We are building high resolution panoramic cameras which are easy to use and do not require additional PC in the car and can be operated. Also we've got a highest panoramic resolution camera (Viking) with six 6k x 4k modules shooting incredible dynamic range.

https://www.mosaic51.com/cameras/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5cmaa1QGr0 (shit, YT compression is heavy on this one)

Are these products available to buy and what is the actual price?

Yep. All products you see on the site you can actually. With Viking camera it is a bit more complicated process, but yes, you can order it too.

It is necessarily to go through sales@mosaic51.com

Here are case studies from our clients: https://www.mosaic51.com/case-studies/ Here is the video from one of our clients: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1rK4N82UEE

Here is the videos and examples on our YT channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mosaic360cameras/videos

We make an e-commerce subscription that uses a smart scale to trigger re-orders at the perfect time. The timing is dynamic for each customer’s usage patterns.

The scale lasts 1.5yrs per battery charge. Our customers cancel subscriptions at a way lower rate compared to typical subscriptions because their experience is way better.

We bootstrapped to over 100 customers. We 3D printed the devices and hand soldered dev boards for the internals.

We manufacture the device ourselves in China, now.

Company is bottomless.com, though we are now focused mostly on integrations with third party e-commerce sites over direct customer acquisition.

Brilliant idea

How did you convince the first customers to adopt this without a case study? I imagine selling a individual scale to each consumer is tough no?

Huge fan of your product. Was using a different coffee subscription that would always show up late and I'd be without coffee. The scale does work well and I've only had once or twice have coffee show up a day late.

Just as an FYI, I’ve been looking for a commercial version of this - WiFi scale that uses a webhook or what gave you to trigger a procurement process. Labs around the world would love to be able to track inventory by weight for chemicals as well as goods. Might be an interesting pivot.

Worked on this hardware startup from 2011-2015: http://VOXON.co - a volumetric 3D display company.

We went through the Microsoft Accelerator for Kinect powered by Techstars 2012 in Seattle. It was very hard to find investors, mentors, and partners for hardware at the time.

That said - building the technology from the ground up and seeing how much people loved it - I’ve never been more proud to be apart of a project. We were doing something really hard - but together we built exactly what we said we’d make.

Working solo on building an Android-compatible device, coming from a pure-software background. It's certainly a different world than the OSS community and available resources there, but the homebrew/hobbyist scene seems to have made a number of things more accessible over the past few years.

I'm struggling with how to put an Android-compatible board together with just the peripherals I want (similar to a Pi but slimmed down), and lining up suppliers/manufacturers who can put it together.

Looking for help/guidance on people familiar with any aspects of this!

not an expert by any means on this, but I've worked before with the Khadas VIM boards, which are development boards where you can install Android and start developing your project. The advantage of those is that they use Amlogic chips which are very affordable and come pretty much ready as product from Alibaba (search for "android box" and you'll find a bunch of white-label board/cases that are ready to be used)

Alternatively, if yoou want more control/performance than what Android gives you, you can also look into Buildroot, which makes it very easy to build a custom linux distribution with your application in it, that is, you get a firmware ready to burn in your board with linux and your app running in it.

Good luck!

We are doing a military IoT products, for blue force tracking, supply chain control and low bandwidth datalink operations. Full stack - cases, pcb, firmwares, antennas, software and deployments. Can’t do show as we have only one customer now. As we are working in aggressive environment sometimes it is hard to keep cost in a reasonable range. Also finding a VC or fund interested in dual purpose or military hardware is hard and differ from a consumer products, so still FFF model of financing and this produce issues with scaling

Would love to hear more about this, I'm a (mostly) fullstack digital/RF design engineer with 7 years in designing/building/testing tactical space SDRs. Based out of the Washington DC area.

wildzzz256 at gmail

How did you secure that first customer? Congrats

Yep, for deskwork. We shouldn’t sit for extended periods of time, but moving is usually too interrupting. We pair with a standing height desk and make it trivially easy to change posture every few minutes without disturbing your focus.

We did the simplest study that surprisingly chair makers don’t do- can you prevent pain. Our chair prevented discomfort for 100% of participants compared to a high end ergonomic chair.

More here: https://www.movably.com/

I take advantage of this thread to ask about an educational idea that is connected with hardware but is not looking for a business but a way of social contribution.

The idea is to do basically something like Romo [1] (they closed) but at the cheapest price possible (assuming a level of quality). This is along the lines of OLPC [2]. I imagine a simple vehicle that is controlled by a mobile "smart" device and you can take the advantage of the capabilities of this device (e.g. camera).

The Bandai SmartPet Robot Dog is at USD ~52 now [3]. How cheaper can all this? Not assuming worker cost just components, it can be open hardware. I understand that a level of quality should be achieved. For example, the motors used should be protected against burn.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/peterseid/romo-the-smar...

[2] https://laptop.org/

[3] https://www.japantrendshop.com/bandai-smartpet-robot-dog-p-1...

Our fund, Founder Collective, isn't hardware-focused, but we have backed a lot of transformative hardware startups – E.g., Whoop, Formlabs, Cruise, Desktop Metal, Kinsa, Running Tide.

We've also backed a bunch that haven't been able to make it work. It's a tantalizing space, but wickedly hard. That said, we remain ever optimistic and if you're building something in hardware, please reach out – joeflaherty@foundercollective.com

I had one! Spent four years depleting my savings and burning through investor money before calling it quits. Most important lesson I've learned is to not build another Hardware startup with my own money.

Leftover investment memo: https://www.notion.so/gethuan/Huan-Memo-1e6ee1d17d72440cb981...

Our company is developing affordable phased array antennas. The end goal is to serve the next-generation commercial wireless communications and sensing markets (e.g. 5G/6G, mmW imaging radar, etc), though as we're bootstrapped most of our work currently is in Defense.

On the very off chance there's other RF or antenna engineers out there, we're hiring (US remote)!

What's the name of the company?

Novaa RF, website [1] though it's really just a splash page

[1] https://www.novaarf.com/

We developed a sensor enabled flooring material that replaces the fiberglass structural layer in typical commercial flooring and it turns the floor into a massive readable surface. We use that to create a "spatial API" for applications to be developed for the built world. Our most popular application to date has been one that we developed with the Department of Energy where buildings that have our floor sensors integrate real time occupancy data to the building management system and it intelligently controls the HVAC in real time in order to reduce waste. We typically save 30-35% of a building's energy waste/cost all without impeding on occupant privacy or comfort. Another interesting application under development is using the sensors as a way to predict fall events in senior living environments through the ongoing analysis of a patient's gait

This has absolutely piqued my interest. Just trying to think of solutions or entertainment options that are better suited with this than CV. Seems like CV would suit the DOE at a lesser cost. Although the privacy is of concern there.

At https://www.thethingsindustries.com and the open source LoRaWAN developer platform https://www.thethingsnetwork.org we used to do a lot of hardware ourselves: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/419277966/the-things-ne....

Now we do very little and only focus on the SaaS network management part of it. We still have this product www.genericnode.com

We now have 220 hardware partners that can do it much much better than us: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/device-repository/

Aura is sort of a hybrid: we’re building a photo sharing network but the destination is our digital frames, so now that we’re running at scale we spend at least as much energy on software as hardware: https://auraframes.com/careers

We (https://www.converge.io) both build sensors (and SaaS) and work with 3rd party sensors to analyse concrete operations and material performance for construction to help make it more efficient and sustainable.

Hardware is definitely hard.

https://darkhive.ai small uncrewed aerial systems for public safety. Other companies still dominate the market and for good reason. We aim to bring US-made equipment that is competitive and affordable.

This is very cool! Is the intent that it'll have a bunch of modular stuff so law enforcement can equip it to do different tasks (e.g., different cameras or sensors)? Not sure if you ever saw the Axon (Taser) announcement that was quickly halted but they pitched doing something like this for schools with a taser attached. A bit dystopian but maybe useful given the awful number of school shootings and poor response times as evidenced by Uvalde

The smaller unit we are building will have some different payload configs. We aren’t going for glass breakers and such based on feedback and what is most popular on the market (DJI). We want these to help mitigate the dangerous environments in public safety and be disposable. Like a frisbee. Shoot me an email! Happy to chat more.

Let me know if you need someone to test in a high heat environment and give you product feedback.

I am on the UAS committee for a large city (1.6m+ people with 13k+ employees) and its amazing how many us-based companies don't take into account how hot it can be in the desert. I recently saw a vendor who needed to redesign/change their batteries and motors because of it.

As some unsolicited advice, if you aren't working to get on the DIU Blue list [1], I highly recommend it. Many if not most public safety agencies are using that to make purchasing decisions.

I have been sounding the alarm on how DJI is likely going to get banned at some point with all the trade shenanigans going on, but many of the US based companies just aren't as operator friendly.

[1] - https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas

Thanks for the support! We would love to come out and test. Shoot me an email in my profile and let’s stay in touch. Happy to share more.

We do warehouse analysis using autonomous robots: https://www.dexory.com

Hardware is hard – not just the actual work, but the different approaches needed to development, management, and fundraising. We started in the consumer space, moved to the retail/customer service space, and only really hit our stride when we pivoted to the logistics space.

Our series A was announced last week so there's plenty of momentum and the industry generally is enthusiastic about technology. Ongoing improvements in robotics technology generally is finally making this sort of application feasible!

We are making flying robots over here . We build a transportation drone in our shop in Austin: composite, CNC, additive manufacturing, EE etc on the hw side + ML/realtime on the software side. http://www.skyways.com If you are up for a challenge and you are interested to join the team feel free to reach out to me directly on linked in https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbinet

Not quite a startup yet, more a partially implemented idea, but I'm making a set of "retro consoles" to fufill a lifelong dream of making proper second screen games, in the style of Four Swords for the Gamecube. I've been honestly disappointed in the existing implementations, so I figure it's time to do it myself. Lua for game coding, fpga based gpus, and proper hardware expansion options. And that's all for the handheld. It's still in prototype stage, but it's an idea I've been mulling over since the DS released.

We are building smart Gastronomy Products.

First of all our Selfservice Bar (https://limifyze.com). This system enables hotels to offer up to 150 cocktails autonomously, eliminating the need for additional staff. And Ledovation (https://ledovation.at) revolutionizes service-guest communication in restaurants. We are located in Austria. Both the development and the assembly of the devices take place in-house.

Tried this in the past, indeed hard to do, and, very heavy on cash investment, don't even think about bootstrapping it, crowdfunding might be the only way moving forward unless you somehow received huge investment.

Most important thing is "ecosystem" to me, i.e. the logistics of ICs, PCB factories, upstream and downstream vendors, etc are all in the same place or city, I don't see anywhere in US that provides this yet.

I went to Shenzhen instead, which has everything a hardware startup dreamed of, COVID kind of screwed it up for me though, back to software stuff.

Would love to pick your brain. Have an email?

I'd also be interested in picking your brain. If you happen to have time, send me an email.

We are working on a not yet announced smart agriculture / agtech sensor, and have contributed to projects on the smart energy grid and also smart/autonomous mining.

Hardware is hard, but IoT is harder. IoT involves bridging the gap between hardware, firmware, networking, security and cloud teams, which makes the challenge that much more complicated. Different teams have different concerns and getting a sense of all these sometimes conflicting concerns is tough.

https://axceta.com

A couple of good friends of mine spun out hardware start-ups over the past five years. Even though I'm a data/software guy, I helped out with both, up to and including soldering components onto demo boards. Since I've a couple of kids, mortgage, temperamental automobile etc. etc. I wasn't in the position to work for either startup for low salary/high equity though, and I'm kind of glad I didn't TBH.

The first startup should be way bigger and well known than it is, but the product/market fit isn't too good and marketing in general is poorly executed. This startup looks at electro-muscular stimulation to help out diabetic and pre-diabetic folks with getting some exercise (and folks with mobility/joint issues). To be honest I can't see this company surviving another five years unless there's some radical shake up in the way it's marketed, which is as a consumer device rather than a medical device.

The second startup is a spin out from a medical devices incubator, and is a real niche market - basically nerve implants to manage chronic pain. The target market is something ridiculously small, on the order of a handful of people per 100k who may benefit from it. At the moment, the only thing keeping this startup afloat seems to be generous research grants, can't really see how they can stay going unless the overall plan is to drive some hype and hope to get acquired by some bigger fish.

At my company we're working on building smart boilers, where what's actually heating the water is servers. We then send customers computation to those boilers.

This way of doing things allow us to eliminate a lot of carbon emission for computation that would otherwise have been done in classic hardware where the heat is not reused at all.

You can learn more about it at https://qarnot.com !

That’s a neat idea. Have you considered expanding to other applications, like home heating? It occurs to me that there are a lot of systems that produce heat as a byproduct, and a lot of other places which want heat, and bringing the two together would be a great accomplishment of efficiency.

That's what we we're doing in the first place ! Only problem is that people usually don't heat there home in the summer.. Obviously.. Meaning the compute would not be available through long time periods..

However public pool still needs to be heated, and same goes for industry that requires hot water, there production won't just stop for multiples month of the year !

I remember seeing this and think it's absolutely awesome. If I were someone with such a boiler installed in my home, would I be able to run my own workloads on the device as well? I'd be kinda sad having that much compute but only being able to use it for heat.

You can use the compute as a client of the compute interface, but not really for your own boiler.

Something worth to point out : Those boilers are more for industry oriented usage, such as heating a pool, or industry that requires hot water, not really home-grade boiler.

We make industrial devices that use electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) to measure free radical content of chemicals in real time by sampling directly from the flow line. Right now we're focused on measuring asphaltene content in crude oil pipelines, but we're trying to expand into chemical manufacturing as well.

https://www.microsiliconinc.com/

Very high complexity, long slog (7+ years) food automation robotics venture here. We actually moved to Shenzhen (from elsewhere in China), then moved out of Shenzhen as we matured to a point where additional industrial space was required: large blocks of land around Shenzhen are prohibitively expensive. For us, in-house manufacturing and all that goes with it are firmly in-scope.

We maintain a presence for supply chain, but EOY 2022 moved operations out of China owing to an alignment of operational challenges under the current domestic environment, macro-political conditions, venture maturity and correspondingly changing needs. Managing that move alone was an extremely complex challenge involving all manner of curveballs - more than enough for a decent film.

We anticipate raising in the US 4Q this year for 2024 US go-to-market.

Coming from software, hard is an understatement. Purely on the R&D front we've had to successfully innovate in fields as varied as electrical and power engineering, electronic engineering, global cross-market food regulations, HVAC, hydraulics, mechanical engineering, process engineering, refrigeration. On the business front we've had to tackle - as an early stage venture - the many challenges of cross-border operations including cross-border financing, HR, intellectual property, legal, a shifting array of visa rules, supply chain (chipageddon, shipageddon), etc. The team has waxed and waned up to over a dozen full time and back down to two at present. Over this time I've seen countless tangentially-aligned investment fads and trends come and go: Chinese 'New Retail', YC's short-lived move to China (flew me to Beijing to interview with the partners), COVID-fuelled global overinvestment in last-mile food delivery, drone delivery, ghost kitchens, 15 minute groceries, etc. Right now there's a huge number of ventures failing in related spaces, but we remain very confident.

We persist largely because we started from a good place (already spoke fluent Chinese, knew China, could self-fund), have focused on a genuinely venture-scale business strategy, maintained a low burn rate, stuck to fundamentals, ignored the trends, and I am personally lucky enough to have both a hugely supportive family and early stage investor sharing my high conviction plus enough residual resources from a prior exit to continue to invest personally. At this point, our technology is genuinely best in class globally by multiple objective metrics (eg. footprint, cost per location, degree of automation), and we are correspondingly well placed for aggressive venture-scale growth and returns. We therefore look forward to securing significant US funding, leveraging our China supply chain, and consolidating US hiring and operations to achieve go-to-market. But damn, has it been a trip!

Our front is software but on the backend we’ve built a mobile proxy pool and continue to work with hardware to improve it. More details on our blog: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...

Not an official startup, but I developed an open-source laser cut and crocheted social robot platform during grad school. We ran a few workshops for ~middle schoolers to build it and there are a few built by other researchers and roboticists out in the wild.

https://github.com/hrc2/blossom-public

Not at a startup scale but building and selling, PongFox Table tennis robot. https://pongfox.com

I have been recently working on integrating it with OpenAI api and adding a pad for players to serve and work on their third ball drill after service which is not available in 2Kusd robots.

This is the simplest thing somebody is going to post.

I make KeyboardBumps and sell them at https://KeyboardBumps.com

They were meant to be fun goofy tactile stickers for finding the right function keys. They ended up helping people with peripheral neuropathy (usually from chemotherapy or MS).

We are attempting to make some sensors used in the automotive industry, I am currently tied to a client but will start up our internal development again during the autumn.

We work mostly with hardware, as in HIL and everything around a HIL - it's also these kind of sensors we are trying to figure out properly and create a product from.

I built a healthier men's dress shoe with a faux heel that allows you to walk barefoot while still maintaining a professional silhouette. https://OAKAStudio.com.

Footwear is the most technical and health detrimental part of our wardrobe.

Yes! A very long and tough journey but extremely exciting times... In 2015 we founded Submer (https://submer.com) with my brother-in-law (I know... we knew each other very well and for more than a decade) to try to solve the biggest problems in the data center industry with a highly-efficient liquid immersion cooling technology. These problems are now in an inflection point where all are converging. Among others:

- Chip thermal design power densities keep increasing in such a way that some chips are already impossible to cool unless using liquid and this is being highly accelerated by the end of Moore Law and the usage of more GPUs, ASICs and FPGAs for generative AI, graphics, crypto, HPC...

- Sustainability challenges. An average cloud data center using the typical evaporative air-cooling technologies consume about the amount of water in an Olympic swimming pool every two days and the overall DC industry and IT is estimated to consume more energy than the global air transport. 98% of the energy consumed by DCs is just rejected as heat into the atmosphere.

- The total cost of ownership of datacenters is being affected by the physical limitation of the chip densities increase and its cooling costs, the regulations and energy prices derived from the sustainability, the expensive buildings needed and its speed of construction and other challenges (supply chain, Ukraine war...)

I still remember the excitement of pitching to YC Fellowship batch back in 2015. We were able to get into the final ~100 interviews among 6,500 applicants, but unfortunately we weren't selected. It was still a great experience and motivation and the good news is we are now selling and manufacturing hundreds of MWs of our technology, serving customers worldwide and employing 100+ "Submerians".

Even without being a formal YC Alumni, I feel very grateful for the YC and Hacker News community for the inspiration it brings and very happy to see all these exciting hardware startups! Keep up with the good work!

We're working on a modeling and simulation tool for engineers who design and test embedded systems and next-gen hardware. We help companies shorten their development cycle, reduce costs, and launch faster using model-based design.

It is kind of unfortunate but hardware design tools haven't seen the same level of cambrian explosion that cloud and AI tools have over the past several years. We hope to change that so engineers can design embedded software, simulate algorithms, simplify verification and validation, and use models as digital twins seamlessly.

If you would like to see what we do, check us out at: https://www.collimator.ai/

Pleased to hear of your efforts. Can you help me understand the contrast between your product and Synopsys Virtualizer [1], mbeddr [2], Dymola [3], or dSPACE VEOS [4]?

[1]: https://www.synopsys.com/verification/virtual-prototyping/vi...

[2]: http://mbeddr.com/

[3]: https://www.3ds.com/products-services/catia/products/dymola/...

[4]: https://www.dspace.com/en/inc/home/products/sw/simulation_so...

bcantrill[1] is here. Does Oxide[2] count as a hardware startup?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bcantrill

2. https://oxide.computer/

If we don't count as a hardware startup, I'm going to have some questions about what does count as a hardware startup. ;)

Not technically a startup anymore, (our bizdev manager likes to call us a "grownup startup",) but we're making underwater acoustic wireless communication devices. We're taking a more software defined approach allowing us to be much more leaner, flexible and do more more IoT-esque things in an underwater wireless network.

It's an strange but interesting field. Loads of real, physical problems still left to solve and space for innovative solutions. Lots of hard engineering (software, hardware, etc) to do. But the marine tech industry is traditionally very slow to adopt any new technologies. Makes for some fun conversations. :P

https://subnero.com/

We build robot arm based 3D printers. Surprisingly the company (more scale up than start up tbh) is entirely bootstrapped, and the hardware is pretty mature. But I am a software engineer and that is the area we are struggling with most currently, especially where IT and OT meet.

www.ceadgroup.com

I’m building novel GPS-enabled digital clocks, mostly for myself and family, but I also plan to sell a few on Etsy.

These never need setting or configuration since they grab time/date/location data from the satellites.

My first design is HanuKron, an automatic Hanukkah menorah for sale on Etsy http://HanuKron.com

LunaKron is up next. It shows the current phase of the moon. I am working to get the first prototype running today.

I have ideas for other clocks: a sunset chime; a clock that displays the current astrological sign; advent calendar, etc.

If you’ve got an idea and would like a unique clock made, I’d like to hear about it!

As a student living in a small studio I hated that everyone could hear your bathroom business.

10 years later I’m now trying to solve this problem for small homes and businesses.

Loodio is a bathroom privacy device:

https://loodio.com

Achim from AirGradient.

We design and manufacture open-hardware low-cost air quality monitors. We sell and maintain very popular DIY air quality monitoring kits [1].

I think there are a few things that set us apart from other hardware startups:

- Most of our air quality monitors are open-source software and open-source hardware under CC license and we do NOT have any patents ;). All our code, drawings, schematics etc. are freely available on our website [2]. You can easily flash the monitor with your own software adjustments and point it e.g. directly to your home assistant server.

- Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental health risk and paradoxically the countries with the highest air pollution e.g. in Africa have the lowest dense network of air quality monitors. We try and keep our monitors as affordable as possible to enable disadvantaged communities and countries to monitor their air quality. Me and my co-founder are personally impacted by heavy air pollution and the first priority for us is to make an impact (and by making a good job, hopefully some profit).

- We are fully self-funded and were able to pull off the design & development by having an ideal set of prior experiences and skills, able to aquire customers at an early stage and enough own funds to reach that stage. Working from a low-cost base in Thailand also helped keeping costs down.

- We don't believe in prorietory algorithms and work transparently with many research partners in 4 continents to better understand the performance of low-cost air quality monitor. [3]

- You can read more about our journey and some of the unexpected things that happened in my blog post "Good Hardware Takes Time- The Journey of the AirGradient DIY Kit Production" [4]

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/kits/

[2] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/instructions/ov...

[3] https://www.airgradient.com/research/

[4] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/diy-pro-kit-journey/

OutSail Shipping is turning any cargo ship into a sailboat — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35426482

I apologize if it’s been posted. Not sure if there’s a good way to search 400 comments on HN.

We are building smart cameras for industrial automation and robotics. We are on our 3rd generation design with a 20.5TOPS Toshiba ASIC and Sony image sensors. A lot of sweat and tears have gone in the hardware and software design.

You can load AI models like YOLO, resnet, MiDAS onto it and we are working on porting some generative AI models onto it as well. We have tried to make this as easy as possible for non-devs to be able to use it:

https://docs.labforge.ca/docs/bottlenose-file-utility

We offer monocular and stereo versions. The current gen is 8MP/4K.

I think it would be nice if someone made a high-performance ASIC specifically for tinygrad.

Would this be similar to the Google's Coral Edge accelerators?

I guess but I think Hotz said that tinygrad was specifically designed to _not_ be Turing complete, which allows for potentially much greater optimization and performance than existing accelerators which have to accommodate that.

We're building FPV humanoid robots to do hands-on jobs from home that can be controlled with standard VR headsets: https://robosymbiosis.com/.

Still very much a work in progress. I'm a little obsessed about the UX of things, so I'm really trying to drive the idea that it should feel as natural to use as moving your own body. I love that it combines tons of aspects from VR game design, robotics, and web technologies into a single experience. I expect to have a full scale, really rough looking but functional prototype by this fall.

We're building hydrofoiling electric boats. It's important because it's pretty much the only way to for electric boats to satisfy the range requirements of recreational and commercial vessels, at higher speeds.

Check us out at Candela.com

https://qvntra.io

We're replacing old-school bed alarms and call buttons in Senior Living facilities.

The bed sensors that we manufacture are strapped to beds and monitor for out-of-bed, potential infection and medication error via algorithms on-top of real-time vital sign data.

We mount always-on iPad in high traffic area for the nurses to grab alerts. Sirens are mounted in hallways to grab audible attention. The whole system is Zigbee 3.0.

Nurses are leaving the industry in droves. The "Silver Tsunami" is approaching rapidly. We're helping nurses scale and keeping elderly safer in their homes.

I'm working on the world's brightest lamp: https://presale.getbrighter.co/

There has been a lot of writing about the benefits of bright light in your house and how to set up your own rig (e.g. https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/), but nobody has built a mass market consumer product (one that's easy to set up, has all the right features (dimmable, adjustable color temp, high CRI), and looks aesthetic).

Feel free to contact me at team@getbrighter.co

Can you talk about the power consumption?

Uh. 50,000 Lumens? That's a lotta lumens. Which is awesome. But that's also gonna be running at Imalent MS18 flashlights (which to be fair peak at 100,000 lumens) get well over 120 degrees C in temperature.

Your design seems to have cooling fins. But If it's radiating noticeable amount of heat, I'll only be running it in winter.

Tried to enter in my email and got 419 PAGE EXPIRED.

I guess it'd probably cost a thousand bucks anyway...

Not sure how much I can really say here, first of all because of confidentiality, and second of all because of privacy, but I guess I can say I work on space stuff. Hardware is extra hard when it needs a launch site.

If you're looking for a fun hardware project I'd recommend a buddy's company. As they don't have a HN account, here is their plug:

Exclosure is building a worldwide networks of space monitoring telescopes. We believe that space is for everyone, and that monitoring is the first step in keeping the outer space environment sustainable. We are actively seeking locations to host our observatories, and can compensate hosts with good viewing locations: https://www.exclosure.io/hosts

I've always had the dream of setting up a remote telescope in my backyard, but light pollution has gotten so bad in my area.

We're building a sleep EEG headband which improves the efficiency of deep sleep https://soundmind.co

We use closed-loop auditory stimulation (sound) to boost slow-wave activity in deep sleep.

This doesn't help you get to sleep, but makes the time spent in deep sleep more effective.

Lots of studies look at the impact on immune function, cognitive performance, nervous system response, etc.

Peer-reviewed, published research is on our website at https://soundmind.co

I help out at Hardware Park, Birmingham’s coworking space for hardware startups.

hardwarepark.org

We are making the world's lightest and easiest DIY bicycle caravan.

Right now, the first test trips are happening and the results look promising. Cycling on urban roads and in the forest works really well with the bicycle caravan behind. Camping mode with the tent setup needs to be tested thoroughly before going to market.

Eventually we want to provide kits in various stages of readiness, from barebones fully DIY to pre-cut fabric and plates.

For photos and more information, please visit https://www.theredpanther.org

Neat. Come to Bulgaria, I can take you to a couple of metalworking workshops, and plenty of forests to test your product. :)

Cool idea, thanks!

At 56secure, we have embarked on the journey of constructing AI-powered cameras entirely from the ground up. Our prior experiences with third-party CCTV cameras enlightened us to the possibilities of significantly enhancing security measures. By leveraging AI technology at the edge and integrating it with on-the-ground agents, we are committed to offering users a proactive security solution that surpasses existing standards. https://www.56secure.com

We have a unidirectional gateway with a complete protocol break. Sales are picking up. We’re hoping to deliver a guard later this year.

Hardware may be hard, but what’s really hard are high assurance attack resistant systems.

is it cross domain solution?

It is. Supports file transfers (sftp push and pull), XML (basically file with schema validation, different filters on each side of the protocol break), and TCP and UDP steaming.

We’re proud of how fast it is, among other things.

Sounds interesting. Do you have any formal verification tools in your tech stack?

p.s. are you hiring?

> p.s. are you hiring?

We're always interested in talking to potential candidates, but unless you're in Ottawa work would be truly remote (we all WFH, but we get together at least monthly for lunch, save for the folks in the Maritimes, the UK, etc.).

My HN userid at sphyrnasecurity.com

What protocol? Control systems type stuff?

File and XML (file with schema validation) via sftp, and TCP and UDP streaming. In streaming mode, useful for getting logs, etc., from a SCADA network to a business mode. In block mode, handy for pushing patches the other way.

Among other things.

We develop huge 32" interactive display touch screens for trade shows and conferences that allow users to interact with apps and websites that a company wants to show. They look amazing and are always a show stopper for booths. They run a custom os based on AOSP which allows companies to use there pre made android app for the display instead of having to build anything custom. We also offer a website module that will display your website in full glory and interactivity.

For more information or to rent a display you can send us an email isaac@bigtopdisplays.com

"You solved it, congrats!" :)

Got an email bounce from your address. Would love to hear about your AOSP experience!

Thanks! I Misspelled the email, it's fixed now! Looking forward to hearing from you.

Shameless plug:

At https://flux.ai we are working on taking the “hard” out of hardware!

Also have a great slack based community with lots of hardware folks going

"You bet your ass it works." NEXT LEVEL MARKETING LOL

Working on self-driving stuff in the Ag-space, though not at a startup, but this is after two hardware startup stints: one doing security related computer vision, and then people sensing for space management.

Hardware is fun, but you rarely have the profit margins of a pure software play, so if you're not working on something creating an 'ecosystem', you're upside is probably more limited than a pure sw company. Still, I've liked the hardware products I've worked on, so I don't regret the tradeoff.

One trade-off is that you have a certain level of physical stickiness over software, especially if you have a large fleet of distributed hardware. Tearing out and replacing hardware is expensive and time consuming, that's assuming you can find the right people do it and they are available.

I come from a traditional full-stack engineering background (web frontend + backend) and recently founded a smart toy company[1], the first product built on ESP32-S3. I took a few weeks for me to get comfortable writing firmware (although there is another more experienced engineer doing the primary work and electrical).

I'm really excited for Espressif (the chip maker) to roll out newer versions of their microcontrollers on RISC-V. I would love to see a renaissance of inexpensive personal devices.

[1]: We're pre-launch so nothing to share now.

I have a similar background as you. How are you finding handling the mechanical side of things? I assume your toy is more than a PCB.

There are no motors, so more simple. There are mics, speakers, LEDs, LCDs, buttons, etc. I have a firmware engineer who also does electrical engineering, and a mechanical engineer who works with manufacturing, compliance, and industrial design.

Gotcha. You have a team of people helping out. Sounds super fun!

Thalo Labs a New York City-based company focused on accelerating our path to a net-negative carbon society. We develop systems (hardware+software) that make it easy to measure and capture GHG emissions at the scale of the built environment. We are driven to provide practical solutions to emissions now and scale with the future of the green grid.

See current open roles here: https://jobs.lever.co/thalolabs

We're in agtech building mushroom growing systems for the kitchen counter. After two years of limited production active systems, we're shipping a totally passive solution that can grow a wide variety of mushroom varieties.

Systems come with everything needed, including mushroom liquid cultures and growing media. We continue to iterate the design while testing new varieties and media.

More info at https://mycelerator.com

We’re here to make ethically-made tech sexy so it becomes the Newnorm (yup that’s the brand name).

We just launched our first product ‘Sound’ last week: a pair of earbuds, headphones, and speakers in one modular system.

Check it out here newnorm.tech/sound and pre-order it if high-end wireless audio is your cup of tea!

If not, we’ll have many configs and allow Nike-style customization next year so keep an eye on us.

Throw at me your thoughts, questions, concerns, whatever it might be. Everything helps!

Forgetting https is like forgetting your name, so here you go https://newnorm.tech/sound

Those headphones look like the most uncomfortable things on the planet.

Are they supposed to be over-ear or on-ear?

Over-ear. Curious, why do they look so uncomfortable to you? Is it because of how the earpads look on the render or anything else related to the headband frame?

The cushions look like they have pretty sharp edges. In general, I'm really sensitive to that sort of thing and have to use very specific over-ear headphones; ones that actually go over the ear and don't squeeze around or against it. (I am not sure if yours do)

I'm pretty astonished by the price, my current headphones are studio monitors that costed $50, and according to your website, the retail price of your system will be 16 times that. It's difficult to imagine justifying that, even if you also get earbuds.

Quick disclaimer: we're still figuring things out, so it really helps if we can get more of these pieces of critical feedback!

I hear you regarding the earpads. In the prototypes that we have built recently, the earpads are way rounder than this, so we will fix the renders to reflect this shortly. The headphones are really comfortable overall, we spent and will continue to spend a lot of time working on clamping force and materials, so the earbuds and the headphones will be super comfortable once we're ready to ship.

Now, the price. The current configuration that we're offering now is for the people who are looking for a high-end wireless 3-in-1. If you were to mix and match something similar from the market right now, it will cost you around $800 or more. You can double check that by looking at the features and tech specs section and compare to alternatives on the market (we may add an example on the website soon). Add to that the inability to upgrade or repair most products out there affordably, the price becomes very justifiable. In fact, we're saving this target audience hundreds of dollars in the long term.

There will be other configurations starting $150 next year, this is just the start. We have to go high-end first to be profitable and build the business.

So "$800 value" doesn't mean that you're going to sell the final product for $800, but just that assembling the same sort of system today would cost that much?

No, £800 ($1000) is the retail price. An equivalent set of earbuds, headphones, and mini smart speakers with the same specs and quality would cost roughly the same.

Okay woah, I didn't even notice that the price was in GBP. That's just woah.

I do hope you manage to find your high-end customers.

We are building Hito (https://hito.xyz) - easy to use crypto hardware wallet.

I am a solo founder. We've built everything from scratch - hardware, firmware, backend, mobile. First year from MVP to sales - 200 devices shipped in Q1-Q2.

We are assembling devices in my room in Mission district, San Francisco. Feel free to come and say "hardware is hard" to me, I would love to prove you another ;-)

Building the future of appliances at upliance.ai. Started from the kitchen with a smart cooking assistant - gets recipes all the time, heats-cuts-stirs-chops - and helps make great dishes. We're here - https://www.upliance.ai

(and we've been selling for a few months at this point. 50% cooks are men, and the median user is cooking on weekdays and weekends)

Metal lathe conversational CNC controllers - https://kachurovskiy.com/

FYI your website crashed my browser ...and now it's not accessible anymore

It's Shopify on the default theme. Try https://github.com/kachurovskiy/nanoels/tree/main/h4

We are developing a teledriving system (driving a car remotely by a human operator). Although we don't build our cars, we design and develop our own ECU.

www.vay.io

We are creating a inflatable shippable greenhouse that can be set in 15 minutes on virtually any surface. The construction method reduces thermal mass loss by drafts by 90%. Structure sizes vary from sizes compatible with urban apartment balcony gardens to larger installs combining multiple structures to cover larger areas.

We are designing some turnkey programmable ECU products that suit a range of applications such as low volume electric vehicles, motorbikes, hobby cars, watercraft etc.

They are programmable using visual tools that have some guarantees ie generated code won’t crash.

The ecosystem will provide some additional tools such as data logger and OTA updates with a subscription.

Hardware design 80% complete. The software will be difficult.

Very early stage, but I have a small electronic jewelry project that merges voice sensing electronics to timeless gemstones and bespoke hand wrapped high end jewelry.

The value here is that everyone wants to be more important. A shining crystal that pulses with your voice makes you a celebrity everywhere you go.

Later versions will include an AI assistant that is tuned specifically to keeping you on task and engaged.

I work at a design firm: working with hardware startups is our business. Hardware is hard, but we are available to help:

http://www.nklabs.com

We help with mechanical design, engineering simulation, PCB design, embedded systems, FPGAs, firmware, agency testing, and can help set you up with a contract manufacturer.

Early stage here - self funded. After many years in land mobile radio industry, I decided to start my own thing. Hand held radios are still around, and will be, for many years. We're making them much better - the range, battery life, .. and open sourcing them.

As other said, development can be very expensive and iterations long, unless you're smart about it.

Cobalt Robotics - physical robots for safety, security & facilities management.

Predominantly big-enterprise B2B. SaaS-like unit economics. Post-Series C with marquee investors (BloombergBeta, Sequoia, Coatue, etc). Robots in 8 countries.

https://www.cobaltrobotics.com/

We’re building hardware, but I also extracted some of the business philosophy behind Framework to share what I believe “hardware is hard” means: https://eclecti.cc/bytes/what-hardware-is-hard-really-means

We're working on a device to allow seniors to access the digital world with a haptic interface. We support video calls / photo sharing / content / telemedicine / exercises to bridge the generational gap in digital services.

https://family.cards

Hey :)

I'm fullstack dev at Sencrop.com, we help farmers take better decisions for their crops with the help of IOT: connected rain gauge, temp sensor, hygrometry sensor, anenometer, pyranometer.

And yes, hardware is hard :) but i'm proud to say that we cover a big part of west europe with more than 20k stations deployed and really help people on their field

Rocky Mountain Servo builds fine pointing devices for free space optical comms and space science applications. Our devices are highly reconfigurable, low cost, and easy to integrate. Check out more here:

https://www.rockymountainservo.com

We mow laws with robots. https://yard.bot

We make an IoT device that is used for precision agriculture data collection out in the field, close to the crop that is being grown. We specialize in capturing spectral data related to plant growth and can also cat as a hub for connected sensors from other companies measuring complementary data.

Seeing all the interesting and cool projects and products I started wondering how small companies make sure that they are CE compliment as it has always seemed like a great endeavor to me

An education network of science labs connecting schools, science centers, libraries, and museums around the world to live missions aboard the International Space Station. I could always use help: https://exolab.space

I work in this space. Medical devices mostly, surgical robotics, active implantable devices (LVADS, artificial hearts), dialysis, monitoring and testing and also orthopedic stuff like bone taps, drills, screws and surgical navigation. I have a portfolio website at www.iancollmceachern.com

https://telraam.net/en/S2 Traffic counting by citizens. Counts cars, bikes, pedestrians, buses, trucks,... and we sell it to cities and other mobility professionals.

Pretty much every business (mostly start-ups) I've been involved have been a combination of hardware and software; anyone who can work both is never going to be out of a job.

These days I tend to mix both of those things with bicycles just to add some spice to the challenge :)

#handWaveEmoji. Hello from Tapster Robotics, where we make small shoebox-sized robots for testing phones and other touchscreen devices (like payment terminals). Kind of an extension of my web and app testing work with Selenium and Appium.

I’m cofounder and CTO of a self funded , post revenue , pre profit hardware startup .

High altitude balloons that are payload agnostic. Working on the mass manufacturing process.

Make revenue through consulting and renting out the hardware lab when we aren’t using it.

Austin Texas

Charles@turnsys.com to connect .

We turn shipping containers into microfactories that can be deployed anywhere on Earth. We also retrofit containers for all kinds of fun modular commercial, industrial, and even residential purposes.

Zivid is building amazing 3D cameras, everything is vertically integrated. The low-level challenges look amazing. I'm mostly working as on infrastructure. I encourage you, do check it out.

Kickstarter

Huge # of products on Kickstarter are hardware.

Below is the tech focused offerings (but there is many more categories).

https://www.kickstarter.com/design-tech

I'm working on distributed electronics and control software for high performance torque controlled robots.

https://arbite.io

Not mine, but was impressed with IceWhale technologies. They shipped a custom SBC (Zimaboard) during the covid electronics supply chain shitshow. Was delayed as a result but they came through with solid execution eventually.

Building an inexpensive VOC gas sensor tuned for methyl sulfides, hydrogen sulfides and benzopyrroles with MQTT feature.

Currently both price and power draw are too high.

If it is business successful, I will add other MQTT enabled wireless devices.

Where would you expect to encounter these specific VOCs?

WCs, toilets, lavatories, restrooms, loos, johns, bogs, heads, khazis, commodes and such.

I was briefly interviewing with hardwario.com, a small Czech startup focused on industrial IoT built on open-source technologies. They are starting a new Rust project, and they seem to be doing pretty good!

Rockets! www.stokespace.com

We are building micro-bioreactors on the Raspberry Pi. Yes, hardware is _hard_ (and fun!)

https://pioreactor.com/

I've been in hardware startup bizz for pretty long, starting to feel like an ancient being. It's been all AI/ML, so I'm a software/research type guy in the HW space.

I produce Battery Powered WiFi Temperature & Humidity Sensors

https://www.kokonaut.com

https://www.instagram.com/kokonautinc

Firmware Uploading and Testing Robot Cell: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cmxpg1jhcLE/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GFGZF2F

Side gig designing and maufacturing niche tools for DJ's:

https://cardinia.net

We build downhole electronics. High temperature (175C/350F operation) devices. Multiple circuit boards, sensors, analog and digital, tons of firmware.

Would love to hear more about this, I'm a (mostly) fullstack digital/RF design engineer with 7 years in designing/building/testing tactical space SDRs. Based out of the Washington DC area.

wildzzz256 at gmail

Move to Utah.

Lots of software growth, but much of that is hardware related.

Autonomous last mile delivery robots which are cargo bike sized autonomous vehicles that can carry 100kg in 8 different compartments

www.heytheo.co

Started a hardware startup from my background in sport. It's very tough, especially being the only employee & founder.

It's tough, and it's doable. I went it through. Good luck on your journey!

My startup https://printnanny.ai/ provides monitoring/automation SaaS for 3D printers, but most venture capitalists I've met (including YC partners) categorize PrintNanny as a hardware startup.

I offer Raspberry Pi kits due to shortages/scalper bots. Most of my customers can't find 1-3 Raspberry Pi 4, but I'm able to place orders for 50+ units. I'm not sure if I'll continue the kit line of business; fulfilling hardware products as a solo founder is tough.

We are making electricity safe for workers:

proxxi.co

Focused mostly on manufacturing, mining, construction and maintenance.

We also sell into Telcos and data centers

Peesport.com the world’s best pee bottle

We are building GreyOrange. visit greyorange.com

I work in what used to be an EDA startup

Now it was acquired by a big one though

Not really hardware but almost

Fully reusable rockets!

www.stokespace.com

interesting that most submission here are startups which are selling some hardware where ML is the main product and no-one who is doing discrete (analog) electronics

After how many years do you stop being a startup?

My hardware start up is going to change the world and how you pee PeeSport.com

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