Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 726 posts

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#601

Post by voxadam »

bunnie wrote: post #541

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)…

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

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#602

Post by redat00 »

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 !

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#603

Post by gargablegar »

jiveturkey wrote: post #556
gargablegar wrote: post #277

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 intensi…

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#604

Post by gargablegar »

manicennui wrote: post #282
gargablegar wrote: post #277

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 intensi…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#605

Post by gargablegar »

myself248 wrote: post #312
gargablegar wrote: post #277

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 intensi…

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

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#606

Post by northzen »

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)

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#607

Post by pjc50 »

franckl wrote: post #516
whall6 wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 da…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#608

Post by pjc50 »

missedthecue wrote: post #468
lionkor wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

plastic packaging, of course

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#609

Post by johndmcmaster »

farhadnoorzay wrote: post #377
johndmcmaster wrote: post #368

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 (e…

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

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#610

Post by ed_ »

samstave wrote: post #88
ed_ wrote: post #75

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…

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…

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.

Post reply on HN