Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

I take advantage of this thread to ask about an educational idea that is connected with hardware but is not looking for a business but a way of social contribution.

The idea is to do basically something like Romo [1] (they closed) but at the cheapest price possible (assuming a level of quality). This is along the lines of OLPC [2]. I imagine a simple vehicle that is controlled by a mobile "smart" device and you can take the advantage of the capabilities of this device (e.g. camera).

The Bandai SmartPet Robot Dog is at USD ~52 now [3]. How cheaper can all this? Not assuming worker cost just components, it can be open hardware. I understand that a level of quality should be achieved. For example, the motors used should be protected against burn.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/peterseid/romo-the-smar...

[2] https://laptop.org/

[3] https://www.japantrendshop.com/bandai-smartpet-robot-dog-p-1...

Cheers. Nice to see something whiskey related that isn’t trying so hard to communicate the usual whiskey stereotypes.

I like your sense of humor. The engineers used to jokingly call this the "Orphanator -- the seat so safe only the kids survive the crash." Our marketing people told us to leave the ideas to them....

In a collision, rigidity is actually the enemy. A well designed seat should never be reusable after a crash because all the materials yielded to dump energy. It is better to have energy diverted into stretching, bending, and breaking materials than have it channeled into a baby's body.

We don't use steel (except for one rod), but we do use a lot of 5000 series machined aluminum which is powder-coated. Aluminum is preferable because it is better for creating crumple zones where the materials yield. The other primary material we use is polycarbonate because it has fantastic impact resistance (polycarbonate is used in "bullet-proof glass"). I'll let the marketing team know their materials description failed to impress you :)

Regarding safety, do you have any links around the test results for the Kioma, or other car seats? You've mentioned a lot about the safety scores/test results in comparison to other car seats, but I couldn't seem to find a single mention of that stuff on the website? I also tried to see if something like Consumer Reports had a review of a Kioma car seat (either the current one or the carbon fiber one) but they had nothing.

Yes! A very long and tough journey but extremely exciting times... In 2015 we founded Submer (https://submer.com) with my brother-in-law (I know... we knew each other very well and for more than a decade) to try to solve the biggest problems in the data center industry with a highly-efficient liquid immersion cooling technology. These problems are now in an inflection point where all are converging. Among others:

- Chip thermal design power densities keep increasing in such a way that some chips are already impossible to cool unless using liquid and this is being highly accelerated by the end of Moore Law and the usage of more GPUs, ASICs and FPGAs for generative AI, graphics, crypto, HPC...

- Sustainability challenges. An average cloud data center using the typical evaporative air-cooling technologies consume about the amount of water in an Olympic swimming pool every two days and the overall DC industry and IT is estimated to consume more energy than the global air transport. 98% of the energy consumed by DCs is just rejected as heat into the atmosphere.

- The total cost of ownership of datacenters is being affected by the physical limitation of the chip densities increase and its cooling costs, the regulations and energy prices derived from the sustainability, the expensive buildings needed and its speed of construction and other challenges (supply chain, Ukraine war...)

I still remember the excitement of pitching to YC Fellowship batch back in 2015. We were able to get into the final ~100 interviews among 6,500 applicants, but unfortunately we weren't selected. It was still a great experience and motivation and the good news is we are now selling and manufacturing hundreds of MWs of our technology, serving customers worldwide and employing 100+ "Submerians".

Even without being a formal YC Alumni, I feel very grateful for the YC and Hacker News community for the inspiration it brings and very happy to see all these exciting hardware startups! Keep up with the good work!