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Taking over a Dead IoT Company

blog.kchung.co

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Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#71

Post by hnarn »

manv1 wrote: post #41

Taking over their DNS isn't going to help if they did things correctly. If they did things right each device is going to be doing cert verification with AWS IOT, and that verification will fail. That's client and server cert validation, unless they turned that off. On reset it should still verify the server cert when it tries to call home, but since you have access to the image you can replace that (if they didn't st…

> Taking over their DNS isn't going to help if they did things correctly.

If you had read the post, you would have seen that they did, in fact, not “do things correctly”.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#72

Post by IceWreck »

manv1 wrote: post #41

Taking over their DNS isn't going to help if they did things correctly. If they did things right each device is going to be doing cert verification with AWS IOT, and that verification will fail. That's client and server cert validation, unless they turned that off. On reset it should still verify the server cert when it tries to call home, but since you have access to the image you can replace that (if they didn't st…

There are other ways to accomplish that (asymmetric cryptography says hi). You don't need AWS IoT for everything. I cringe when people's default solution is to make their company dependent on a niche product of another company, especially when its easily avoidable.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#75

Post by skazazes »

Existenceblinks wrote: post #42
luma wrote: post #12

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.

How would you get a quick MVP of PCB + needed interfaces? I'd love to know if there is a PCB design as a service + manufacturer that allows small size of order (as a 3rd party integration). I think they definitely exist .. I just have to figure out who to talk to first.

I don't know of any fully featured services, but something like Fiver (https://www.fiverr.com/) in combination with services like JLBPCB (https://jlcpcb.com/) or PCBWay (https://www.pcbway.com/) could act as an equivalent.

An integrated combination or even a board design offering from either of the two mentioned manufacturers would be awesome and really help bring down the barrier to entry for hobbyists that want to try moonlighting as entrepreneurs

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#76

Post by spuz »

manv1 wrote: post #41

Taking over their DNS isn't going to help if they did things correctly. If they did things right each device is going to be doing cert verification with AWS IOT, and that verification will fail. That's client and server cert validation, unless they turned that off. On reset it should still verify the server cert when it tries to call home, but since you have access to the image you can replace that (if they didn't st…

Could you explain this further? How would ensure that when you connect to https://trainsignapi.com that it validates the response is coming from the expected server? Would you hardcode a certificate on the device? What if you needed to upgrade the certificate? I don't quite understand how AWS IoT fits into it either.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#77

Post by explodingwaffle »

Woof. Adafruit + Raspberry Pi in a shipped product screams to me that they did not have a real electronics guy on their team.

https://ukdepartureboards.co.uk/ is the British equivalent of this, and it seems to do everything right (don’t own one, but have seen on Twitter)- optional subscription, and nice looking hardware (seems like they contracted out for that). Though at the minute I suppose there are barely any trains running here :)

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#79

Post by jadtz »

dimmke wrote: post #40

Articles like this are part of why I love Hacker News so much. I've done a little investigation into producing hardware myself and concluded it was just too big a task for someone without the background who didn't want to put up a ton of capital or deal with overseas manufacturing. I loved reading this.

I am new to hn, and really liked this article. If you know about other interesting articles like this, please mention them. I would love to read.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#80

Post by eschneider »

explodingwaffle wrote: post #77

Woof. Adafruit + Raspberry Pi in a shipped product screams to me that they did not have a real electronics guy on their team. https://ukdepartureboards.co.uk/ is the British equivalent of this, and it seems to do everything right (don’t own one, but have seen on Twitter)- optional subscription, and nice looking hardware (seems like they contracted out for that). Though at the minute I suppose there are barely any tra…

Usually yes, but it sometimes makes sense in a very low volume product.
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