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Comment by hattmall | Hacker News Reader

This is just a basic hygrometer. It's not a mold detector at all. Is this really the level of innovation the army considers impressive? They are taking at least $400k to build 5500 hygrometers. This is something that already exists off the shelf for even less than that.

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If the army buys 5500 hygrometers from aliexpress to install in a military base, they won't just be reading moisture

Surely there are defense contractors already building hygrometers for other defense purposes that could extend their contracts/runs.

Sure but then it would be several hundred per device. The military industrial complex is going to do what it’s going to do.

There’s certainly truth to that, but when you add in all the requirements for those approved sensors (supply chain, certification, utilization of American workers, etc, etc) they may be that expensive to produce.

Then your government client may cancel the deal and you’re left with a warehouse full of $200 parts that should cost $5 that no one else wants.

For the big companies that get their hooks into military and civilian leadership, they’re on the gravy train. But even then, that is on average, many of those projects will likely be big losses.

As opposed to the 750 they’re spending now.

Does the army have strict controls over what troops can bring in the barracks? I get that there are some security implications, but not really. These are super basic devices and there are some very simple controls that can be put in place to mitigate any real concerns.

There’s not really anything super innovative but if you have something that is alerting when there are conditions for mold growth it’s much more likely to get addressed in a timely manner. I have a thermometer and hygrometer in my crawl space with a digital readout on my refrigerator to prompt me when the dehu isn’t working or if there’s a water or duct leak, etc.

True. And Google says basic digital ones are cheap, I just bought a six pack from Amazon for $9.99.

That said it does have an alerting capability…but even then Amazon shows products for $15 that have wireless alerting.

So yeah, $72 per unit indeed looks to be a waste of money.

Even if they weren’t creating their own devices, they also need to pay the developer(s) that are going to write the backend and fleet management software.

$400k in the context of custom development, testing, and administration? That's cheap. And frankly this approach is much more appropriate than the alternatives of defense contractor pork, defective-by-design consumer "cloud", or having people manually do rounds and record numbers.

Also if you want to claim some high ground about not "wasting money", I don't know why you'd use an example of buying Chineseum from overpriced Amazon rather than getting it drop shipped.

I got the sense from the article the software was already done, the $400k seemed to be just for the devices. I could be wrong, the article was difficult to follow in places.

My thoughts as well, just measuring temperature and humidity.

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