91–100 of 213 posts
I didn’t quite understand the need for an injection attack. Once you had bought the domain and could respond to the devices‘ API calls, weren’t you in the driving seat already?
Maybe it’s very North American of me but I cringe when the author says “bad team”. Objectively, they didn’t have the skills, experience, or advisors to do this thing. And if the money truly disappeared, then someone crossed over into “bad” territory. But hardware startups are brutal. Kickstarted hardware is torture. Even experienced and well capitalized tiny teams go through this. A friend did one, rapidly realized t…
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…
> and it seems to do everything right Last time I looked they were missing CE conformance, which afaik is pretty illegal. Surprised they haven't been found out yet.
Really what blocked me the most was CE/FCC conformance. I have done a lot of research into it and I couldn't figure out a way to get it without a massive investment upfront ($10k+). If anyone has experience in that area I would love to talk, my contact info is in my profile.
Who knows, maybe I will get it to a point where it can be sold eventually. I'll certainly write up about my learnings from the project at the very least.
"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?
The third one designed the wooden case and the manufacturing process for it ... /s
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.
If you needed to update the CA, you'd need a firmware upgrade, served with a certificate signed by something chained to the old CA. And then, more likely than not, you'd want to do further updates on a new hostname, because it's hard to do a single hostname and send the right certs to the right clients.
This is a giant pain, and I don't blame people for using public CA infrastructure instead. Especially if your company goes bust, who cares?
The store that made the LED strip caught wind of it some how and they cut out a wooden enclosure for me to put the thing in, with the tube line names etched into the wood, which completely blew me away.
My dad kept on telling me at the time to sell it as a product but even then I knew that not being a hardware guy and not really having any experience building products it would be a dumb, expensive move - and stories like this reaffirm that this was the right thinking.
Not saying it can't be done, it's just someone with more electronics expertise is way more qualified than a guy throwing together a python script on a Pi zero with retail components.
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?
There are a lot of different sorts of programmable signs out there: https://tidbyt.com/ https://www.vestaboard.com/
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…
This is all too common in my experience, "oh we could just use an arduino/pi and a hat and a peripheral" rather than "Design a system that does ". As an EE who spent their primary career programming (horrors I know) and in systems analysis, I see it as the logical extreme of "why use a 555 when I can program an ATTiny to be a timer and do other stuff too!" The allure of having one be able to add features "with just a…
I can believe someone might prefer software for prototyping, but manufacturing? Well, I've seen prototypes enter production, so yes, but still, ugh.