21–30 of 213 posts
"As we discussed earlier, even at $300 the product is too cheap. The sign should have likely been selling at $600 from the very beginning." Even at $600 - there's a screenshot saying the company had three engineers and a marketer. If your 4 employees earn $25k per annum, with the $150 parts cost you'd have to sell 222 signs at $600. And if the employees were on $100k, that's 888 signs a year. That's a heck of a lot o…
Towards the end of the article the author mentions not wanting to pursue this as a business as there are so many cheap programmable signs out there already. As someone who would love to buy one of these and customize it for myself does anyone have experience or recommendations with any of these?
The other path is to buy plain led matrix modules and use some SBC to directly control what's displayed. More fun, but more work. This particular sign uses qty 2, 4mm pitch, 32x64 pixel panels, side by side. Like this one: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832064290423.html?spm=a2g... Lots of choices in pitch, single/three/full color, indoor or outdoor brightness, etc. Though you need to ensure your choice of driver (see paragraph below) supports it. They have different refresh rates, data sequence, and timing requirements.
Then, you pick what to drive it with. Lots of choices there. There are libraries and hardware level-shifter adapters for a variety of things like a Parallax Propeller, Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, etc. With various advantages and disadvantages. Fwiw, the Rpi is usually trickier as you're bitbanging from a non-real-time OS. The Parallax and BeagleBone have better ways to be quasi real time.
Hello, author here. Happy to answer any questions! My apologies for the downtime, I wasn't expecting much traffic today since I submitted the post to HN yesterday but I've started scaling my server now!
Love the story! At one point, you are asking about the purpose of the giant hole in the backside of the display: The most plausible explanation is that, it is to allow air circulation within the device to prevent overheating.
[0] https://hackaday.com/2023/01/09/iot-archaeology-leads-to-api...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire project looks like the result of a high school student's first Instructables. It's hilariously under-engineered and it's clear that these folks had absolutely no idea of how to build a product, IoT or otherwise. Hint: if your product plans involve a raspberry pi, you probably fucked up.
I think dunking on the rpi is harsh - if it allows you to prototype and get your small-volume product out the door quickly, there's lots of other areas you could optimize the BOM first. Better to make a product with 75% gross margins as a single dev in 6 months than a product with 80% gross margins with a team of 6 in a year. Of course, they also overhired and wasted money on other BOM components
It's fine for prototype at a very early stage, absolutely not fine for something you ship to a user.
Hello, author here. Happy to answer any questions! My apologies for the downtime, I wasn't expecting much traffic today since I submitted the post to HN yesterday but I've started scaling my server now!
I think RPi in this thing says it all. It screams it was built by somebody that does not know how to develop a physical product for mass market. There are only three parts in this product that should have any significant cost to them: * the display itself, * the wooden enclosure, * the packaging the product comes in, If there are switches, potentiometers or encoders I am really partial to well working ones and these…
It's effectively a picture frame. There are plenty of standard box frame profiles they are very similar to what they have built. If it was me, I would have explored working with a picture frame company for final assembly, many are used to "assembling" products with extra components (think of stuff on Etsy). The frames are simply cut with a framing guillotine and stapled together.
My estimate would be frame (including custom cut back panel), and final assembly would be in the region of $10-$15 at a US/UK framers. (Excluding electrical BOM)
Hello, author here. Happy to answer any questions! My apologies for the downtime, I wasn't expecting much traffic today since I submitted the post to HN yesterday but I've started scaling my server now!
Just curious what made you come up with at least $30 per LED panel, as these should run you about $10 in bulk.
EDIT: Here is the specific tweet: https://twitter.com/NYCTRAINSIGN/status/926106932573810688
"As we discussed earlier, even at $300 the product is too cheap. The sign should have likely been selling at $600 from the very beginning." Even at $600 - there's a screenshot saying the company had three engineers and a marketer. If your 4 employees earn $25k per annum, with the $150 parts cost you'd have to sell 222 signs at $600. And if the employees were on $100k, that's 888 signs a year. That's a heck of a lot o…
Or charge less and get a recurring fee for the API.
833 subscribers at $10/month? 8,333 subscribers at $1/month?
Hello, author here. Happy to answer any questions! My apologies for the downtime, I wasn't expecting much traffic today since I submitted the post to HN yesterday but I've started scaling my server now!
Love this story. I did something similar with a website. Previous owner took it down, bought the domain from him and it organically grew to over 1m users per month with the same exact functionality. I wouldn't discount your ability to bring this back to market. Would consult a lawyer to see what implications taking over the branding and APIs have. But clearly this has a big market.
I think RPi in this thing says it all. It screams it was built by somebody that does not know how to develop a physical product for mass market. There are only three parts in this product that should have any significant cost to them: * the display itself, * the wooden enclosure, * the packaging the product comes in, If there are switches, potentiometers or encoders I am really partial to well working ones and these…