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Taking over a Dead IoT Company

blog.kchung.co

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Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#111

Post by dom96 »

samwillis wrote: post #26
twawaaay wrote: post #13

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…

Even the wooden enclosure could be done for significantly less. 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 guillo…

Picture frames are indeed perfect for this. I built something similar and the frame cost me around £37.50. My full BOM was around £130 (and that's without any economies of scale).

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#112

Post by dom96 »

napolux wrote: post #30
twawaaay wrote: post #13

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…

Used to work on an iptv set top box user interface (html+js on opera embedded) back in the days. BOM for the board designed in my country... 150$. Chinese manufacturer proposed a redesign 100% compatible with the same features... BOM at 15$ IIRC

How did you find a Chinese manufacturer to redesign it for you?

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#113

Post by sokoloff »

tyingq wrote: post #110
dom96 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ESP32 is perfect for this application. RPI is far too beefy, unless you really want to do everything locally (without relying on an external server to package up the train data for you)

Sure, though 240Mhz, 32bit, optional gobs of PSRAM, etc, aren't usually what comes to mind when you hear MCU. Edit: Yes, you could even use an ESP8266, though 32x128x3 plus X bits of PWM brightness would mean being limited to drawing from storage rather than in-memory manipulation. I'd jump right to the WROOM type devices with PSRAM.

If you need a microcontroller with networking (such as the train sign would), I think the ESP32 (or older/cheaper/less capable ESP8266) is one of the first that comes to mind for most engineers, especially those who aren't full-time firmware engineers.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#114

Post by rohansingh »

dom96 wrote: post #102
michaelt wrote: post #8

"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…

This makes me wonder how Tidbyt's business is doing. They seem to have a fair amount of employees. I actually built something very similar and all in my spare time. I've been wondering how realistic making a side-business out of it is, but if you are a single engineer that has to code the firmware, server, build the displays and market it all... it's pretty tough (especially in your spare time).

We actually only have 4 FTE's today and our business is both sustainable and growing. Our scale is also a couple orders of magnitude larger than the numbers from the article, and we have much better control over our BOM.

Hardware is a tough business and managing cash flow & inventory requires you to be a lot more deliberate than a pure SaaS business. Fortunately we had a lot of examples going in of how not to do things.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#115

Post by jareklupinski »

djhworld wrote: post #98

A few years ago I created something similar for the London Tube although it was much more crude, just a pi zero and a strip of RGB LED lights that represented the colours of the tube lines. 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 a…

there is an in-between: a write-up and a post on hackaday.com :)

would love to see the Pi zero and hacked together code on there!

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#116

Post by is_true »

ColdHeat wrote: post #6

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 the other mark on the back was for the reset button. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#117

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#118

Post by bjacobt »

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 recently hired and working with someone for PCB design/manufacture low volume of IoT devices. As other threads mentions, you can always find folks on fiver and upwork.

Hardware academy is also good, where you can ask questions and meet other folks who build electronics products.

https://predictabledesigns.com/academy/

Happy to talk and give pointers, email in my profile.

Edit: I've no affiliation with hardware academy

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#119

Post by jareklupinski »

dom96 wrote: post #94

In 2020 I set out to build something very similar[0]. This was before I even knew NYCTrainSign existed. I started with zero electronics knowledge and learned a lot. My prototype has been running solidly for way over a year and while I've always hoped I would be able to turn it into an actual product I could sell... doing so proved challenging. Really what blocked me the most was CE/FCC conformance. I have done a lot…

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVAIWfGBARk/

my problem was squeezing the MTA API parser into the ESP32 flash...

as long as you use off-the-shelf / already conforming modules, like the esp wroom etc, the cost for FCC compliance testing goes down into the thousands. it's still a line item, but over a run of 1000-2000 units, it turns into something that costs about a buck per board :)

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#120

Post by jareklupinski »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #5

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?

adafruit sells most of the parts you need if you go the DIY route https://www.adafruit.com/product/5362

great tutorials too https://learn.adafruit.com/rgb-led-matrix-cube-for-pi

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