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Taking over a Dead IoT Company

blog.kchung.co

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Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#171

Post by bshep »

bshep wrote: post #161
tyingq wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Can you interact in a sort of live/api way, or is it limited to writing configuration and "launching" it? Edit: Ahh, that's a great option...assuming that reverse engineered way to send frames is stable, etc.

So the configuration is a one time thing to set the card parameters, you shouldn’t need to touch it once its setup for your panels and layout. As far as I know it can only be done using their widows app. The display is done by sending the card network frames ( someone did a reverse engineering of the protocol, i dont know the details ). You can send the display anything you want.

I just got home and was able to look at some of the RE efforts, here is one that looked interesting:

https://hkubota.wordpress.com/2022/01/31/winter-project-colo...

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#172

Post by walrus01 »

rohansingh wrote: post #114
dom96 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me wonder how Tidbyt's business is doing. They seem to have a fair amount of employees. I actually built something very similar and all in my spare time. I've been wondering how realistic making a side-business out of it is, but if you are a single engineer that has to code the firmware, server, build the displays and market it all... it's pretty tough (especially in your spare time).

We actually only have 4 FTE's today and our business is both sustainable and growing. Our scale is also a couple orders of magnitude larger than the numbers from the article, and we have much better control over our BOM. Hardware is a tough business and managing cash flow & inventory requires you to be a lot more deliberate than a pure SaaS business. Fortunately we had a lot of examples going in of how not to do thin…

Have you considered making a larger version that is something like double the width, and would sell for approximately double (maybe $300?).

I just took a look around the tidbyt website and it looks like a fairly well polished product.

https://tidbyt.com/products/tidbyt

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#173

Post by mordae »

walrus01 wrote: post #169

Any idea what these LED matrix signs cost as the raw unit, ready to integrate with your own thing for a DIY project? Does the cost scale somewhat linearly with number of LEDs or horizontal x vertical resolution in pixels?

https://jlcpcb.com/partdetail/Worldsemi-WS2812BMini/C527089

$0.01 per LED

About $2 per 100x100 mm board if you order about 100 of them.

About $1 per above board for assembly service.

Total: $6 per 15x15 LED board of 100x100 mm.

Total: $12 per 30x30 LED board of 100x100 mm.

I have no idea about how many would you actually need.

As for the power supply, each LED draws 12 mA. So you are going to need quite a beefy supply.

15x15 grid = 2.7 A @ 5 V

30x30 grid = 10.8 A @ 5 V

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#174

Post by walrus01 »

mordae wrote: post #173
walrus01 wrote: post #169

Any idea what these LED matrix signs cost as the raw unit, ready to integrate with your own thing for a DIY project? Does the cost scale somewhat linearly with number of LEDs or horizontal x vertical resolution in pixels?

https://jlcpcb.com/partdetail/Worldsemi-WS2812BMini/C527089 $0.01 per LED About $2 per 100x100 mm board if you order about 100 of them. About $1 per above board for assembly service. Total: $6 per 15x15 LED board of 100x100 mm. Total: $12 per 30x30 LED board of 100x100 mm. I have no idea about how many would you actually need. As for the power supply, each LED draws 12 mA. So you are going to need quite a beefy suppl…

I was thinking something more like assembled modules of 100x100 or similar LEDs in chunks all together

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#175

Post by incanus77 »

TickleSteve wrote: post #138
luma wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with rPi is storage and filesystem. You need to issue a shutdown command and wait for it to complete before removing power in order to help ensure that it will come up without problems. This will literally never happen with a consumer IoT device. Also, SD media is extremely prone to failure. It's fine for prototype at a very early stage, absolutely not fine for something you ship to a user.

You would typically use a read-only filesystem in an embedded system, not the default raspbian style distro. This allows you to a) not require a clean shutdown and b) saves your physical media from writes.

This. Check out https://balena.io as one example.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#176

Post by sizzle »

csunbird wrote: post #19
ColdHeat wrote: post #6

Hello, author here. Happy to answer any questions! My apologies for the downtime, I wasn't expecting much traffic today since I submitted the post to HN yesterday but I've started scaling my server now!

Love the story! At one point, you are asking about the purpose of the giant hole in the backside of the display: The most plausible explanation is that, it is to allow air circulation within the device to prevent overheating.

In a retail or home setting, you can mount the sign on a wall and route electrical wiring through the hole for a flush fit.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#177

Post by nsedlet »

jareklupinski wrote: post #120
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #5

Towards the end of the article the author mentions not wanting to pursue this as a business as there are so many cheap programmable signs out there already. As someone who would love to buy one of these and customize it for myself does anyone have experience or recommendations with any of these?

adafruit sells most of the parts you need if you go the DIY route https://www.adafruit.com/product/5362 great tutorials too https://learn.adafruit.com/rgb-led-matrix-cube-for-pi

Second this. The 32x64 version is what I used to make this digital tide clock as a project with my nephew https://www.filepicker.io/api/file/UzFNawTTWq4h5h6YF9Im. It fetches tide data from NOAA to tell you next high and low tides.

We also made an arcade game with the LED screen.

Not the cheapest route but it’s relatively easy and fun to get it working

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#178

Post by bshep »

walrus01 wrote: post #169

Any idea what these LED matrix signs cost as the raw unit, ready to integrate with your own thing for a DIY project? Does the cost scale somewhat linearly with number of LEDs or horizontal x vertical resolution in pixels?

They are standard P4 panels, you can buy them for about $20-30 depending on seller/volume. They are 64x32 pixels.

You can also buy P5, P10 and other sizes. They number tells you how many millimeters between each physical pixel.

I use P10s for my Christmas display, they look good from about 15feet away or more.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#179

Post by guiambros »

rohansingh wrote: post #114
dom96 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me wonder how Tidbyt's business is doing. They seem to have a fair amount of employees. I actually built something very similar and all in my spare time. I've been wondering how realistic making a side-business out of it is, but if you are a single engineer that has to code the firmware, server, build the displays and market it all... it's pretty tough (especially in your spare time).

We actually only have 4 FTE's today and our business is both sustainable and growing. Our scale is also a couple orders of magnitude larger than the numbers from the article, and we have much better control over our BOM. Hardware is a tough business and managing cash flow & inventory requires you to be a lot more deliberate than a pure SaaS business. Fortunately we had a lot of examples going in of how not to do thin…

Glad to hear! Happy Tidbyt user here. The device is incredibly well made, and love how you've been iterating. Wish the company all the success!

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#180

Post by guiambros »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #99
bpicolo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of different sorts of programmable signs out there: https://tidbyt.com/ https://www.vestaboard.com/

Thank you! The Tidbyt looks like the more approachable of the two. Less than $200 vs $3k for the Vestaboard and a it has a purposefully simplified Python like dev lang to pull data and shove it into widgets.

I'm a happy Tidbyt user. The device is really well made, it has a bunch of widgets that you can load from their app, and you can create your own and push to it (although I haven't spent much time trying it).
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