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A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

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Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#11

Post by jffry »

bcoates wrote: post #9
jffry wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building it with mil-spec parts can legitimately raise the cost. Generally, components have a higher failure rate early in their life, then that failure rate goes down, and eventually goes back up. Mil-spec components are the ones which survive the early failure rate curve, so you're paying for that component, plus the others which didn't survive, plus the initial wear-in process itself. Now, the $1000 price point on…

For custom hardware with a substantial fraction of the feature-set of a modern smartphone, plus way more sensors, $1000 seems ambitiously cheap. They aren't going to sell a billion of them, R&D and tooling costs are going to push the price up a lot.

I know that many fire departments and other first responders are very severely constrained by budgets. There's lots of interesting things out there, but they just don't have budget for gizmos which cost multiple tens of thousands of dollars. A $1000 price point seems much more feasible. Though if you throw this into a burning building, I wonder if it would survive to be used again.

Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#12

Post by michaelt »

jffry wrote: post #5

What it can’t do quite yet is survive a hard fall, but the company is working on that and expects to have durability testing finished this year... Isn't its durability kind of one of the major selling points? The primary use of these is to throw them into hazardous environments. It seems to me like getting the electronics into a package that would survive the beating would be priority #1

If the aim is to gather a panoramic image while in the air, I would have thought priority #1 would be getting a compact sensor that didn't suffer motion blur when flying and spinning at the same time, in low light conditions, with battery power, low weight and a tiny lens.

I mean, my phone camera produces poor images when I'm trying to hold it still, whereas a thrown ball can fly at 80mph or spin at 20-30 revolutions per second.

Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#13

Post by DanBC »

jffry wrote: post #5

What it can’t do quite yet is survive a hard fall, but the company is working on that and expects to have durability testing finished this year... Isn't its durability kind of one of the major selling points? The primary use of these is to throw them into hazardous environments. It seems to me like getting the electronics into a package that would survive the beating would be priority #1

> Isn't its durability kind of one of the major selling points?

Or you make them cheap enough to be semi-disposable. That way it only needs to survive long enough to transmit the images back. If they find a surviving ball that's a bonus.

Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#14

Post by lockmovdwordptr »

zorlem wrote: post #8

This idea (a throwable ball with imaging and other sensors) and several prototypes have appeared on HN before, the first one around 2 years ago. This exact product has reached the HN front page in the beginning of 2013 [1]. I find it strange that none of the prototypes have actually managed to reach a production stage, given that the potential market - military, LE, emergency responders is (supposedly) there. Maybe t…

My opinion is that it's significantly more difficult for a startup to sell to military/fire departments/etc than to the general public. What could likely happen is that some big company with "good connections" will end up developing a similar product and get the market.

Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#15

Post by jffry »

michaelt wrote: post #12
jffry wrote: post #5

What it can’t do quite yet is survive a hard fall, but the company is working on that and expects to have durability testing finished this year... Isn't its durability kind of one of the major selling points? The primary use of these is to throw them into hazardous environments. It seems to me like getting the electronics into a package that would survive the beating would be priority #1

If the aim is to gather a panoramic image while in the air, I would have thought priority #1 would be getting a compact sensor that didn't suffer motion blur when flying and spinning at the same time, in low light conditions, with battery power, low weight and a tiny lens. I mean, my phone camera produces poor images when I'm trying to hold it still, whereas a thrown ball can fly at 80mph or spin at 20-30 revolutions…

At SIGGRAPH 2010, Microsoft Research showed off a technique [1] where they attached an IMU (measures acceleration/rotation) to a DSLR. They recorded motion and used it to deblur the image.

A ball flying and spinning through the air should have a fairly simple blur, though of a potentially much higher magnitude. I'm not familiar enough with the state-of-the-art, but my gut tells me that post-facto image processing could yield impressive results.

This also doesn't have to be extremely high-res sensors. A lower-resolution sensor with larger pixels would collect more light, allowing for a faster shutter speed, meaning less blur.

[1]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/im...

Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#16

Post by jffry »

DanBC wrote: post #13
jffry wrote: post #5

What it can’t do quite yet is survive a hard fall, but the company is working on that and expects to have durability testing finished this year... Isn't its durability kind of one of the major selling points? The primary use of these is to throw them into hazardous environments. It seems to me like getting the electronics into a package that would survive the beating would be priority #1

> Isn't its durability kind of one of the major selling points? Or you make them cheap enough to be semi-disposable. That way it only needs to survive long enough to transmit the images back. If they find a surviving ball that's a bonus.

Sure, but presumably these devices (and included sensors to measure things like temperature, oxygen/CO/CO2 levels, etc) could be much more useful if they would survive being thrown into the building, bouncing around, and coming to rest, and then being able to still provide useful telemetry. They might slowly melt in a fire, but in other scenarios (e.g. a HAZMAT situation), they wouldn't be terribly useful if they couldn't survive long enough to come to rest.

Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#17

Post by solistice »

Barnabas wrote: post #2

My favorite part: > Bounce Imaging is planning to sell an emergency responder version for about $1000, a military version for something under $3000. Because, you know, military .

Generally it goes Consumer, Industrial, Automotive, Medical and then Military Grade when it comes to chips. Differences can include higher heat tolerances or additional fail safes, such as additional watch dog timers, etc.

Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#18

Post by happyFunBall » 

  "To Make Danger Zones Safer"
Dangerous for who? Safer from what or whom? This "safety ball" is there to help one group of people shoot at another group of people, and it's wrong to implicitly state that one group is good and the other evil, simply by virtue that one has this Happy Fun Ball, and the other does not. What if both teams have one? Whose safer now?

I bet this would be just as useful in a home invasion, or whatever, but you know we always have to put the "WE'RE SAVING LIVES" spin on every escalation in the Limited Warfare technological arms race.

Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

Re: A Bouncing Ball To Make Danger Zones Safer

#19

Post by nostromo »

zorlem wrote: post #8

This idea (a throwable ball with imaging and other sensors) and several prototypes have appeared on HN before, the first one around 2 years ago. This exact product has reached the HN front page in the beginning of 2013 [1]. I find it strange that none of the prototypes have actually managed to reach a production stage, given that the potential market - military, LE, emergency responders is (supposedly) there. Maybe t…

Selling to the government is no easy task.
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