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Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

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Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#511
post #439

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…

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!

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#512
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.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#514

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#516
post #503

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 coo…

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 adva…

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

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#517
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/

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#518

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 coo…

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).

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#519

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. Fr…

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

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#520

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 coo…

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

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