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Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

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Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#501

Post by paperfiber »

digdugdirk wrote: post #473
paperfiber wrote: post #441

We are building a cyber foundry in Los Angeles to reshore American manufacturing. Using in-house composites, Rangeview 3D prints highly complex ceramic parts and pours molten metal into them autonomously. Our process can make components with material and geometric specifications no other metalic manufacturing process is capable of. We have worked with Rivian, Boeing, Airbus, and are aiming for military spares for pla…

Very cool. Are these investment casts? Or are they reusable?

Investment castings, we break the mold off and recycle the ceramic. That way you don't need draft angles or other limitations.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#503

Post by whall6 »

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…

I’m having a hard time understanding the seasonal energy storage component. Can you dive into this a bit more? I wasn’t able to find much on your website.

I work in the energy industry and this is one of the largest issues that utilities (and plenty of others) face (and even go as far as installing thermostats that they can control in their customers’ homes).

I’m wondering if there’s anything that can be done to advance the 2030 timeline? Both from an investor and potential customer perspective, that’s a lengthy timeline for such an interesting value prop.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#504

Post by gbin »

We are making flying robots over here . We build a transportation drone in our shop in Austin: composite, CNC, additive manufacturing, EE etc on the hw side + ML/realtime on the software side. http://www.skyways.com If you are up for a challenge and you are interested to join the team feel free to reach out to me directly on linked in https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbinet

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#505

Post by petabytes »

geethree wrote: post #401

If you're looking for a fun hardware project I'd recommend a buddy's company. As they don't have a HN account, here is their plug: Exclosure is building a worldwide networks of space monitoring telescopes. We believe that space is for everyone, and that monitoring is the first step in keeping the outer space environment sustainable. We are actively seeking locations to host our observatories, and can compensate hosts…

I've always had the dream of setting up a remote telescope in my backyard, but light pollution has gotten so bad in my area.

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#506

Post by chaibiker »

Yep, for deskwork. We shouldn’t sit for extended periods of time, but moving is usually too interrupting. We pair with a standing height desk and make it trivially easy to change posture every few minutes without disturbing your focus.

We did the simplest study that surprisingly chair makers don’t do- can you prevent pain. Our chair prevented discomfort for 100% of participants compared to a high end ergonomic chair.

More here: https://www.movably.com/

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#507

Post by dilawar »

_benj wrote: post #235
SpaceL10n wrote: post #152

I'm head of engineering at a local kiosk company (www.advancedkiosks.com) and we are doing fun things with very little resources! We recently implemented Google MediaPipe for presence detection. That was fun. We use custom printed microcontroller boards to control certain peripherals like LED strips and fans. We design in 3D print our own brackets. Things like that. The job requires a lot of creativity and knitting t…

So cool, and I love all the mentions of "fun" :-) I remember implementing a "kiosk" but the way my employer wanted it was a full screen electron/react app running on a windows server. It was such a pain working around windows to grab full screen, start a GUI application and so on... all the while I kept thinking, this could be a "simple" Qt/QML app running on frame buffer on an RPI! Heck, we could even customize the…

https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~gogo/humor/hum_toast.html

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#509

Post by ahaucnx »

Achim from AirGradient.

We design and manufacture open-hardware low-cost air quality monitors. We sell and maintain very popular DIY air quality monitoring kits [1].

I think there are a few things that set us apart from other hardware startups:

- Most of our air quality monitors are open-source software and open-source hardware under CC license and we do NOT have any patents ;). All our code, drawings, schematics etc. are freely available on our website [2]. You can easily flash the monitor with your own software adjustments and point it e.g. directly to your home assistant server.

- Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental health risk and paradoxically the countries with the highest air pollution e.g. in Africa have the lowest dense network of air quality monitors. We try and keep our monitors as affordable as possible to enable disadvantaged communities and countries to monitor their air quality. Me and my co-founder are personally impacted by heavy air pollution and the first priority for us is to make an impact (and by making a good job, hopefully some profit).

- We are fully self-funded and were able to pull off the design & development by having an ideal set of prior experiences and skills, able to aquire customers at an early stage and enough own funds to reach that stage. Working from a low-cost base in Thailand also helped keeping costs down.

- We don't believe in prorietory algorithms and work transparently with many research partners in 4 continents to better understand the performance of low-cost air quality monitor. [3]

- You can read more about our journey and some of the unexpected things that happened in my blog post "Good Hardware Takes Time- The Journey of the AirGradient DIY Kit Production" [4]

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/kits/

[2] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/instructions/ov...

[3] https://www.airgradient.com/research/

[4] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/diy-pro-kit-journey/

Re: Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?

#510

Post by lotsofpulp »

genmud wrote: post #376
Firmwarrior wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can tell that guy's not a parent, haha. It's a shitload of money, but at least in this case I know that I'm getting value out of it. It's very easy to piss away a fortune on badly-made Chinese plastic trash in the world of baby accessories.

Agreed, my only thought on the $1000 price tag was that I already have a seat that is well rated and don’t want to throw away or donate a perfectly good $800 car seat/stroller system. Like cheap end car seats when we looked were in the 200-400 and nicer ones were in the 600-1200 range.

There are many brands of car seats available at Walmart/Target for ~$100, plus or minus $25.
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