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Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

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Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#251

Post by arandr0x »

godelski wrote: post #225
arandr0x wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers have full-time managers (which are a lot more overhead to pay for but kinda serve that purpose from the client perspective) and are paid well enough and consistently enough to usually only work one job on a given day. Subcontractors sometimes do decide not to show up to your job site because another employer offered them a bonus to do theirs that day instead. The point isn't (only) to humiliate or…

> it's to counter an economic incentive they have. I think economists would call that a feature and not a bug. It is essentially an auction (something economists LOVE). You could instead take that money that you're spending on surveillance and instead spend it on giving the contractors a bonus to show up to your place instead. I really don't buy that this would "shame" them into coming to your place first. Everyone a…

I would imagine shaming doesn't work because I think residential GCs have higher demand for workers than there is supply, but the cameras still solve the problems of making it easier for the GC to react when it happens (and the reaction could be offer to pay that sub more if the project is late or all the other subs have been showing up, realizing the work from the earlier stage wasn't done, and going home, or it could be lengthening their project schedule).

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#252

Post by AdamH12113 »

We make industrial devices that use electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) to measure free radical content of chemicals in real time by sampling directly from the flow line. Right now we're focused on measuring asphaltene content in crude oil pipelines, but we're trying to expand into chemical manufacturing as well.

https://www.microsiliconinc.com/

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#253

Post by cuSetanta »

gimili wrote: post #164

Not 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

Oh sweet, hey Valispace. I can vouch for this software as a spacecraft integrator. I worked with it a few years back as part of a trial and the power of inputing real world hardware measurements of equipment back into a system and see the impact of the measurements system wide is very powerful.

While it is aimed at the spacecraft industry, I can see any industry with concurrent engineering taking advantage of this sort of system.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#254

Post by gambiting »

lijok wrote: post #220
gambiting wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>GP's asking a legitimate question about chemical outgassing etc. Parents have concerns like this, and some parents more than others. Obviously, and outgassing happens a lot in any car especially if it's brand new. So I'll ask again - why drive kids in a car at all if this concerns them this much?

>> why drive kids in a car at all if this concerns them this much? Because they have to Genuinely confused what stance you're taking here

>>Genuinely confused what stance you're taking here

That a car is going to expose your child to an order of magnitude more "chemicals" than a baby seat ever could - it's like asking how much sugar is in your coleslaw that you're having on the side of a large five guys milkshake. Probably some, but if you're concerned about sugar you have much bigger things to worry about.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#255

Post by LeifCarrotson »

jagtstronaut wrote: post #171
remote_phone wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baby seats have expiration dates and it’s scary how many parents fall for the emotional manipulation around that. It makes the used car seat market dead as well as hand-me-downs

I wouldn't care about an expiration date, but I avoid the hand-me-down car seat market for the wreck reason. The carseats are only designed to be in one. I personally wouldn't know how to definitively say it had never been in one.

Hand-me-down, to me, connotes reuse within the same (possibly extended) family.

I'm fine sharing our used carseat with my 6yo only child's grandparents so that they can more easily help with my nieces and nephews (2 weeks, 1yo, 3yo, 4yo, and 5yo - oof!). My wife and I know it's not been in an accident, we would not misrepresent that to the detriment of our own family.

But I would not buy one from even the most trustworthy Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace listing imaginable.

I personally would love tamper-evident components within a carseat - think "Tip and Tell" [1] but for 3-axis accelerations. Impact-sensitive product labels exist such as those at [2], but I'm not convinced that the same accelerations and crashes that would damage polystyrene impact-absorbing foam would set off a glass ampule designed to break when you drop a rental camera lens or something like that.

1: https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-866/Damage-Indicators...

2: https://spotsee.io/impact

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#257

Post by szaroubi »

We are working on a not yet announced smart agriculture / agtech sensor, and have contributed to projects on the smart energy grid and also smart/autonomous mining.

Hardware is hard, but IoT is harder. IoT involves bridging the gap between hardware, firmware, networking, security and cloud teams, which makes the challenge that much more complicated. Different teams have different concerns and getting a sense of all these sometimes conflicting concerns is tough.

https://axceta.com

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#258

Post by tadfisher »

sitkack wrote: post #188
aquaphile wrote: post #23

We 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 strap is a single point of failure. Each mount should be attached to the seat brackets individually. Those brackets need to be braced and not just bolted through plywood. Having patents on innovations is necessary, but if you have innovations that will save kids lives, you should find a way to make those broadly usable by all. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10967762B2/en?oq=1096776... This this TOS usual for…

> The strap is a single point of failure. Each mount should be attached to the seat brackets individually.

That's not how our Recaro seat works, nor our original baby seat, nor the booster for our older son. Each of them attaches to the seat anchors using a single strap with clips on either end, one on a length adjuster.

This design looks pretty much the same; the plywood is just protection for the car upholstery, and doesn't act as a load-bearing element.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#259

Post by MagicMoonlight »

franckl wrote: post #217

We are building the world's highest temperature heat pump. It can reach 1000℉, when other commercial heat pumps usually reach a maximum of 320 ℉. It is a big deal because factories have to rely on polluting natural gas to produce their process heat. We estimate that it represents 3% of the world’s annual CO2 emissions and a $10B+ annual market opportunity. We are currently building a 5kW prototype at 480℉/250C to coo…

Those chips should come in special packaging saying they're eco friendly

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#260

Post by tda »

We build robot arm based 3D printers. Surprisingly the company (more scale up than start up tbh) is entirely bootstrapped, and the hardware is pretty mature. But I am a software engineer and that is the area we are struggling with most currently, especially where IT and OT meet.

www.ceadgroup.com

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