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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Get this guy into YC. He knows how to do it, but not how to sell it.

This needs to join the families of devices that find wooden studs, electrical wiring, and plumbing. This is a general purpose technology. It can be reprogrammed to find other things. It should be in a blister-pack at Home Depot if it can be made cheaply, and in a hard case at Tool Town if it can't.

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Is there anything that reliably finds wooden studs in walls? I've tried a whole range of different stud finders and all of them are at a level of reliability roughly on par with the Psychic Friends Network: "I think there may be something there... or is it over there? No, perhaps there".

In the end the most reliable way of locating studs I found was going outside, measuring the distance between the nails in the exterior cladding, and then using those measurements on the corresponding inside wall.

Cheap thermal camera lets you literally see the studs. Does not work when ambient temperature inside is the same as outside though

Good point, I've used that to find all sorts of things inside the walls. As you say, it works best when there's serious thermal bridging going on.

Receptacle boxes are nailed to studs, once you locate one you can find the others along that wall if you know the stud spacing.

Magnets find studs pretty well in my experience

Experience and tapping with your knuckles :-)

Hi, thank you so much for your comment, the research was cool to do, but the market isn't there, and this is not something people really want (to retake YC's wording). You can have all the tech you want, but at the end of the day, the important thing is to have something that really brings value to your customer

Property managers handling municipal property in mid+ cities will want one.

Any company dealing with construction waste disposal will want one.

Both will have no problem shelling out 1000 euro per unit.

I interpreted the comment as “give this guy some money and he will figure it out”. You have some serious skill, this just wasn’t the right idea.

Needs a team with someone who works on product fit and market evaluation. A handheld device that analyzes hidden materials cheaply has a market. Microwave beam-forming and neural nets in a handheld device at a low cost is new technology. And get a patent, or there will be cheap ones from Shenzhen.

Don't listen to YC. Reach out to Bosch.

there is a dutch DIY reddit group and the most common daily post is: Is this asbestos? if there would be a 20-50 euro device to confirm this im sure plenty would buy it

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