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Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
251–260 of 375 posts
Re: Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. Anyone who hated writing code but had to, like biologists and chemists, now don't have to.
This is arguably a dangerous fallacy, particularly for anything critical. When the person doesn't know programming, it becomes harder to guide agents and do reviews, leading to overlooking issues and accepting mistakes. This gets amplified for any creative solutions or fixing future problems, where it is something the LLM was not trained on or has limited data about the subject. Plus add how much money spent on token…
The current situation is that the person that doesn't know programming will do it anyway. They will likely make more mistakes than an LLM will.
Re: Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I see some parallels with the aftermarket for old cars. Holley's entire catalog is "here's a thing that'll modernize your 1960s engine without replacing the whole damn engine" This kind of thing is a low-volume, low-margin business by nature. It's those kinds of businesses that the megalomaniacs of our field tend to ignore. There are people with needs, and money they are willing to exchange for a solution to…
There is no shame and no business there. We just read a story of someone who didn’t want to pay market price and went DIY. There are companies doing bowling alley equipment and you can pay them for maintenance. Is there a single one of those on F500 list? No and people are running those companies and what OP did … he didn’t want to pay market price. Well yeah those companies are overpriced if you are software enginee…
It's just lack of competitive pressure. I bet if you investigate you will find there are only a couple of suppliers that have the bowling alley market sewn up between them.
Re: Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
#254[dead]
Re: Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
#255Thank you for posting this, it reaffirms what I've been thinking for so long. There are many opportunities to retrofit old systems of all types with modern low-cost embedded technologies. Around 2019 or so I was approached by an engineer who had a small business retrofitting very old machine tools with modern motion controls. Think very large lathes and planers. The problem they had was that in order to get these sys…
> There are many opportunities to retrofit old systems of all types with modern low-cost embedded technologies.
I'd leave out the "old" there.
An example: Friends work(ed) as engineers in theaters and music-venues. The costs for (DMX) equipment is insane. Some lamps, rigs or controllers are so expensive that shows only rent them. While there's lots of cases where you don't want to cut costs¹, quite often a cheap variant cuts it just fine. So apparently there's a lot of Pie's, Arduinos, ESP32s and old androids used to handle stuff. Custom, hacked, duckt-taped solutions. All of them are certain a startup offering generic but cheap modules that engineers can customize, would be an instant hit. Especially if "service" can be bought with it.
Or a friend who installs (climate) control systems in (food)factories, who cludges together arduino's and some hacky web-interfaces, who is certain that the industry would love some "off the shelve" solutions that installers can build their own hardware- and user-interfaces on is a very much wanted product. The industry (in EU) is according to him, one built on "lock ins", where a factory starts off with AcmeInc controllers and then slowly Acme will start charging almost "extortion-fee" alike figures just to fix stuff on a sunday night.
Or, a friend who has a fruit farm with lot's of freezer-storage (running hundreds of KWs), whith whom I cludged together some Arduino's and home-automation to control the freezers to run when electricity is cheap or free. Stuff like this is available for consumers at reasonable prices, but the moment the Amperages go to industry-level, the costs explode. Where a simple remote controllable power-switch can cost €1000s. I'm certain that there's hundreds of thousands of small warehouses, supermarkets, traders, logistics that could save a few hundreds to thousands of €'s a year, by controlling their freezers, heaters, pumps, pressurizers, dryers and whatnots smarter with "turn key" modules built from generic low cost hardware.
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¹ relevant: There's a lot of "Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM" behind it: if you go for the cheap €800 chinese knock-off and mid-show something starts failing, its your fault. But if that €10.000 controller starts failing, it's no-ones fault.
Re: Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
#256Thank you for posting this, it reaffirms what I've been thinking for so long. There are many opportunities to retrofit old systems of all types with modern low-cost embedded technologies. Around 2019 or so I was approached by an engineer who had a small business retrofitting very old machine tools with modern motion controls. Think very large lathes and planers. The problem they had was that in order to get these sys…
> There are many opportunities to retrofit old systems of all types with modern low-cost embedded technologies. I'd leave out the "old" there. An example: Friends work(ed) as engineers in theaters and music-venues. The costs for (DMX) equipment is insane. Some lamps, rigs or controllers are so expensive that shows only rent them. While there's lots of cases where you don't want to cut costs¹, quite often a cheap vari…
With respect to bowling alleys, for things like professional shows or food safety it's a bit more than "nobody got fired for buying IBM". The stuff's gotta be able to survive field conditions and not cost millions of dollars in refunded show tickets or spoiled foods. Manufacturers test and make themselves accountable for this. Cheap, customized modules work until they don't, and by then the engineer who put the custom system together in the first place isn't there to fix them. Who would you call when some quick-and-dirty integration code that was burned into these embedded modules without ever being put in a source versioning system fails in some weird edge condition? OP is an SRE, it's ok for him, but the average farmer or show operator doesn't have the skill.
Re: Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I see some parallels with the aftermarket for old cars. Holley's entire catalog is "here's a thing that'll modernize your 1960s engine without replacing the whole damn engine" This kind of thing is a low-volume, low-margin business by nature. It's those kinds of businesses that the megalomaniacs of our field tend to ignore. There are people with needs, and money they are willing to exchange for a solution to…
I once expected an aftermarket industry to pop-up to hybridize old cars. Old rear-wheel drive manual cars sound easiest. Generator attached to the flywheel instead of the starter motor, and then find some way to squeeze a drive motor by the rear diff (probably more complicated, but surely not impossible). I thought something might pop up once companies like Bosch started making generic e-axles for manufacturers to us…
My guess:
1) New cars are too cheap to make at scale.
2) Old cars are quite unsafe to drive, comparatively (airbags, backup cameras, lane departure alerts, blind angle alerts, etc)
Re: Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no shame and no business there. We just read a story of someone who didn’t want to pay market price and went DIY. There are companies doing bowling alley equipment and you can pay them for maintenance. Is there a single one of those on F500 list? No and people are running those companies and what OP did … he didn’t want to pay market price. Well yeah those companies are overpriced if you are software enginee…
It's just lack of competitive pressure. I bet if you investigate you will find there are only a couple of suppliers that have the bowling alley market sewn up between them.
Work out how many bowling alleys there are and how many of them are in the market for an upgrade or a fresh install, trying to get to be the king of that hill is a lot of work and risk for not really life changing rewards compared with what a self-avowed SRE could make just pulling paychecks
Re: Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once expected an aftermarket industry to pop-up to hybridize old cars. Old rear-wheel drive manual cars sound easiest. Generator attached to the flywheel instead of the starter motor, and then find some way to squeeze a drive motor by the rear diff (probably more complicated, but surely not impossible). I thought something might pop up once companies like Bosch started making generic e-axles for manufacturers to us…
My guess: 1) New cars are too cheap to make at scale. 2) Old cars are quite unsafe to drive, comparatively (airbags, backup cameras, lane departure alerts, blind angle alerts, etc)
Aerodynamics as well, new cars and especially ev/hybrids are slippery compared to many/the average if we take old cars to mean 50’s through 70’s.
Re: Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once expected an aftermarket industry to pop-up to hybridize old cars. Old rear-wheel drive manual cars sound easiest. Generator attached to the flywheel instead of the starter motor, and then find some way to squeeze a drive motor by the rear diff (probably more complicated, but surely not impossible). I thought something might pop up once companies like Bosch started making generic e-axles for manufacturers to us…
My guess: 1) New cars are too cheap to make at scale. 2) Old cars are quite unsafe to drive, comparatively (airbags, backup cameras, lane departure alerts, blind angle alerts, etc)
2) cars have had airbags for a pretty long time. Backup cameras are a simple retrofit. Lane departure alerts are not universally loved, mine is turned off...