Remember, no venture is too small or niche! It's the passion and innovation that counts.
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
Sad to see how few other hard healthtech people there are here, they seem to be few and far between.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Fun fact, we probably have the best port-o-potty detector in the world.
I previously built Plethora (automated CNC machining) and am happy to help all hardware / manufacturing startup folks. Please feel free to reach out.
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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/
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.
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.
Didn’t make the cut for YC Summer 2023, looking forward to applying again with 6 more months of development progress…
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.
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
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 :)
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.
If you'd like to discuss my email is in my profile.
Also just released the first hardware engineering ai assistant: https://youtu.be/uLEOPpqiUok
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!
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.
Follow the development process here:
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.
I’d love to connect with anyone else doing similar things. My info is in my bio.
Breakoutgames.Com Activate.games
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!
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.
Cool video of moto carrying stuff (just like the 2016 google prank vid) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sqyjag9yRUA
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.
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
Not exactly a startup, but a small business.
[^0]: https://tinypilotkvm.com
[^1]: https://mtlynch.io/posts
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.
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
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 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 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.
https://www.mosaic51.com/cameras/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5cmaa1QGr0 (shit, YT compression is heavy on this one)
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.
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.
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!
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/
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...
[3] https://www.japantrendshop.com/bandai-smartpet-robot-dog-p-1...
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
Leftover investment memo: https://www.notion.so/gethuan/Huan-Memo-1e6ee1d17d72440cb981...
On the very off chance there's other RF or antenna engineers out there, we're hiring (US remote)!
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/
Hardware is definitely hard.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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!
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.
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 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.
Footwear is the most technical and health detrimental part of our wardrobe.
- 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!
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/
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
www.ceadgroup.com
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!
10 years later I’m now trying to solve this problem for small homes and businesses.
Loodio is a bathroom privacy device:
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...
I apologize if it’s been posted. Not sure if there’s a good way to search 400 comments on HN.
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.
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.
Check us out at Candela.com
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.
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
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
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
hardwarepark.org
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
Hardware may be hard, but what’s really hard are high assurance attack resistant systems.
For more information or to rent a display you can send us an email isaac@bigtopdisplays.com
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
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.
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.
See current open roles here: https://jobs.lever.co/thalolabs
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 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!
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 ;-)
(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)
www.vay.io
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.
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.
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.
As other said, development can be very expensive and iterations long, unless you're smart about it.
Predominantly big-enterprise B2B. SaaS-like unit economics. Post-Series C with marquee investors (BloombergBeta, Sequoia, Coatue, etc). Robots in 8 countries.
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
These days I tend to mix both of those things with bicycles just to add some spice to the challenge :)
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 .
Huge # of products on Kickstarter are hardware.
Below is the tech focused offerings (but there is many more categories).
Currently both price and power draw are too high.
If it is business successful, I will add other MQTT enabled wireless devices.
https://www.instagram.com/kokonautinc
Firmware Uploading and Testing Robot Cell: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cmxpg1jhcLE/
Lots of software growth, but much of that is hardware related.
www.heytheo.co
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.
proxxi.co
Focused mostly on manufacturing, mining, construction and maintenance.
We also sell into Telcos and data centers
Now it was acquired by a big one though
Not really hardware but almost
www.stokespace.com