The way the hostname is set, allowing an incredibly simple shell injection, reminds me that the S in IoT stands for Security.
Taking over a Dead IoT Company
61–70 of 213 posts
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#62"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.
This. It is fatal to charge a one-time price for services that have perpetual operating expenses.
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#63The way the hostname is set, allowing an incredibly simple shell injection, reminds me that the S in IoT stands for Security.
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Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#64This was a really good read. It's part IOT security, part story about startups gone wrong. The WayBack Machine has it https://web.archive.org/web/20230109144459/https://blog.kchu... As does Google https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:71rSDb...
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Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#65I build something similar https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vbz-fahrgastinformation/ but with way less BOM and I keep getting asked that I should sell them. The primary reason I don't is because I don't want to support something like that for the next 10 years...
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Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#66"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…
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Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#67Kudos to the author for a cool reverse-engineering job. Nice hack.
The sign wasn't the most problematic "mininum viable product" I've seen. If it were a rapidly developed first prototype, I'd even be impressed.
I would bet they spent significantly more than $3 on the packaging and miscellaneous BOM items. I was going to say the wiring harness alone would be much more than that, but it looks like most of it is included in the Adafruit panel kit.
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#68Hello, 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!
Sharp mind and entertaining writing!
I've had a few projects like this where I list out the BOM then go for 'reasonable business success profit' and scratch my head at exactly this line:
> At even just 60k per founder, with the profit per sign sold being maybe $400, you would probably need to sell ~600 signs at full price per year to create enough revenue to run payroll.
Hardware is an exponent to the value of the internal reward, but the root of all business profit. We need a better funding mechanism for this style of development - more like the hardware lifecycle - wasn't Bolt doing something like that?
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had found some tweets by the company where they talked about using an Adafruit panel that was $40. The price on Amazon was about $30 so I figured I would go with the lower price. They may have switched to a lower cost panel but my guess is that didn't happen. EDIT: Here is the specific tweet: https://twitter.com/NYCTRAINSIGN/status/926106932573810688
The generic name for these panels are "HUB75", based on the interface they use for driving them. I can confirm, these are $10-15/ea in small quantities on sites like Aliexpress. But you're likely right, they were probably buying retail from Adafruit.
"HUB75" refers to the 16 pin connector and specific structure of the square wave signals it's expecting (row order, pixel order, etc). This particular sign appears to use a 4mm pitch (space between each R/G/B led), indoor-level brightness SMD leds, and modules that are 32x64 pixels, like this one on AliExpress: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832064290423.html?spm=a2g... ( ~$8 + ~$9 shipping to the US for single qty).
There are various "HUB75" panels of different pitch, brightness, LED type, matrix size, etc. Also, there's variations like "HUB75E" with 5 address lines instead of 4. Address lines are typically A/B/C, A/B/C/D, or A/B/C/D/E. And there's also "HUB08", "HUB12" and other standards.
Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company
#70"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…
Why does a project like this need three engineers? Two, I can kind of see (a hardware guy and a software guy, though it doesnt look like the hardware guy was doing much here), but three?