https://oxide.computer looks great
I don't really understand what they're making and what differentiates their product. Is it a private cloud but designed so you can just drop it in place and turn it on instead of having to set up the cloud?
Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
161–170 of 726 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#162I'm building trading cards made with e-ink displays. https://www.wyldcard.io/blog/introducing-wyldcard https://www.crowdsupply.com/wyldcard/wyldcard-devkit
I had an idea that you might be able to build, now that I see 'you' again:
Would you ever design an E-Ink "Life and token counter" aimed at people who play Commander format MTG? Given the amount of time and effort it would take me to DIY, I'd easily pay $50ish for a standalone device of the type.
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#163We make the world's best baby car seats. https://www.kioma.us Fatherly Magazine calls it "The Car Seat of the Future". It's been crash tested, flight inversion tested, flammability tested and mom tested. It is full of patented innovations to make kids safer and parenting more enjoyable. It required lots of material science, production techniques, supply chain adjustments, and a surprising amount of software (to model…
Looks nice and easy to clean. I don't know why the regular "Target car seats" have so many creases and folded layers, it's a major PITA to clean :)
Some are better than the Target basic ones, but even the "good" ones are way too complicated to clean, and it's like they've never even considered a kid might barf whilst in one, and some of the effluent will disappear into some weird crevice never to be revealed again.
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#164Not a hardware startup per-se, but we are ex-satellite engineers who out if frustration with available tooling have developed the engineering software every hardware engineer deserves: https://www.valispace.com
Also just released the first hardware engineering ai assistant: https://youtu.be/uLEOPpqiUok
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#165We're working on "life support systems" for algae photobioreactors. This includes monitoring the health of the algae, monitoring and controlling the environment to optimise algae growth, providing feedback to users on growth and experiment progress, and uploading data to our own cloud. We're more software than hardware, but without the hardware capability we wouldn't have been able to attempt it. Previously we tried…
That's super cool! I worked last year on an algae bioreactor. I was growing chlorella in plastic bottles in my room, just for the heck of it. That year I also met some people working for a University of Edinburgh startup using algae to consume the tails from whiskey production. Honestly, I really hope that algaes see a wider adoption in consumer and business processes, because they're really fun and fascinating organisms.
Out of curiosity, are you looking for interns? I can work in the UK and the US. If you have contact information of some kind, I can send you my resume!
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#166We make the world's best baby car seats. https://www.kioma.us Fatherly Magazine calls it "The Car Seat of the Future". It's been crash tested, flight inversion tested, flammability tested and mom tested. It is full of patented innovations to make kids safer and parenting more enjoyable. It required lots of material science, production techniques, supply chain adjustments, and a surprising amount of software (to model…
The price is insane man. The best of the best car seat according to lots of reviews(Cybex Anoris-T) is "only" £599, your thing is significantly more and I don't see why it's any better.
Edit: sorry, let me rephrase that - not insane, just hard to justify.
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your website shows OEM cameras and an off the shelf plastic enclosure, along with basic LED floodlights. What hardware are you making? Not saying your product isn't cool, just not clear what hardware you are "making" vs. assembling.
You're not wrong. We have custom boards inside to handle the AI compute and power, but we mostly do assembly. If a software startup assembles a bunch of open source hardware together and packages it as a product, would you say they don't "make" software?
Is assembly manufacture? Is glueing together FOSS libs coding? Probably not but I'm No True Hacker.
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#168We're building Volition [1] to organize the world's mechanical components for MechEs, roboticists, mfg. techs, and beyond. Imagine McMaster-like UI quality, but ultimately across every good OEM / distributor. I previously built Plethora (automated CNC machining) and am happy to help all hardware / manufacturing startup folks. Please feel free to reach out. [1] https://govolition.com/
This looks fantastic. It would be really great to have some proper competition to McMaster in terms of making part information accessible. I'll keep this in mind for future products, good luck bringing it fully to market!
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your website shows OEM cameras and an off the shelf plastic enclosure, along with basic LED floodlights. What hardware are you making? Not saying your product isn't cool, just not clear what hardware you are "making" vs. assembling.
You're not wrong. We have custom boards inside to handle the AI compute and power, but we mostly do assembly. If a software startup assembles a bunch of open source hardware together and packages it as a product, would you say they don't "make" software?
If a software startup assembles a bunch of open source hardware together and packages it as a product, would you say they don't "make" software?
No, I'd say they are more of a software company than a hardware company though. All software runs on some kind of hardware, but these days it is pretty rare for that hardware to be very unique or custom.
I was mostly just curious what custom hardware you had, since that was the topic at hand. My curiosity comes from working in the surveillance AI space for the last ~15 years, and having done a number of custom (as in we made the whole thing) cameras with AI, but now there is a trend more towards using a lightly OEM'd camera with custom firmware in many cases.
Considering the availability of cameras with advanced SoCs capable of doing edge inference, I wanted to ask more about your hardware and your design choices in this market, but I think I'll just bow out. Good luck with your startup!
Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
#170We make edge AI cameras. After focusing on services for a while, it has been a different type of journey to switch to the product. We did an open source pilot product on esp32, and got surprisingly more interest than we thought, so now we are working on a high performance (4k, 60fps, AI chip) device. Lite-esp32 camera https://www.crowdsupply.com/maxlab/tokay-lite Source-code: https://github.com/maxlab-io/tokay-lite-p…
How do these compare to the Luxonis cameras? https://www.luxonis.com/
Not OP, but I'm very familiar with both.
Luxonis is way more powerful and has an Intel VPU (Movidius). It's not really meant to be a standalone platform, so it needs a host board (Linux SBC like the Pi). It takes a lot more power, but it can do 60fps on small Yolo models. Its resolution is a lot higher as well.
ESP32-S3 has a pretty small memory capacity, and doesn't have H264-H265 hardware encoding, so you'll be on low-res, low-fps. It only does MJPEG (AFAIK) streaming, so you'll also have to deal with high latency if you want to send that data somewhere. The big bonus is that it's low-cost and low-power, and you're running it directly on the core without an OS.
This means you can do stuff like sleep the cores until something wakes it up (like a PIR sensor that detects people), and it will start streaming in a second or two.
TL;DR: Luxonis stronk, but needs big batteries or plugged in. ESP32-S3 can run on small batteries or solar.