Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
Amidst the sea of software startups, I'm keen to learn who in our community is braving the often-quoted "hardware is hard" mantra. Whether you're working on IoT, robotics, consumer electronics, or something completely off the wall, please feel free to share below.
Remember, no venture is too small or niche! It's the passion and innovation that counts.
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[ 40.0 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadHardware may be hard, but what’s really hard are high assurance attack resistant systems.
We’re proud of how fast it is, among other things.
p.s. are you hiring?
We're always interested in talking to potential candidates, but unless you're in Ottawa work would be truly remote (we all WFH, but we get together at least monthly for lunch, save for the folks in the Maritimes, the UK, etc.).
My HN userid at sphyrnasecurity.com
Among other things.
There are manufacturing costs, marketing and inventory risk. But still… what am I missing?
Don't forget that any manufacturing run itself is a huge risk. Tiny changes that need to be made to address anything from RF performance to fit and finish can invalidate a run and just burn up hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars (depending on scale)
I was interested in doing a new HDPE product development on my own, but I'm a bit nervous this is a deep tooling rabbit hole.
Otherwise you don't have a business. Please don't ask me how I know this.
10x is a rule of thumb, YMMV. You just need to make the above inequality evaluate to true. You can (maybe) raise money to deal with the various non-recurring expenses. Oh and you should pay your employees too.
I’d love to get your advice, can I contact you?
Maybe 2-3 share a single root cause, and it's not clear how you'd prevent this from happening in the future.
If you're shipping large volumes, this can add 10% to the MSRP, but if you're shipping low volumes, $50-100/hr of weeklong diagnosis and investigation can easily add 50-300% to the price of each unit.
And that's if everything else is going perfectly. Which means you lucked out and found an amazing Chinese contract manufacturer who works with you hand-in-hand to fix any design bugs and manufacturing issues, and ensure parts availability.
https://bedrockwireless.com/
Fun fact, we probably have the best port-o-potty detector in the world.
Also, Unions hate this right?
For example, they can look back through yesterdays events to see that their plumber showed up - and then they'll know they need to go check on the work. The alternative is trying to get the plumber on the phone to figure out if the work had been completed or not - which is difficult in 2023.
There's not a lot of unioned workers in most states for residential construction. But autoworkers, and anything else in manufacturing would be used to the constant monitoring. Commercial construction also typically has fulltime site superintendents, who would do this anyway.
The GC can often bill it down to the homeowner as antitheft, which reduces time/money to complete the build. The biggest being time. An example, if custom windows are stolen, it could delay a project by months right now.
That being said, as someone with digestion issues, tracking bathroom habits is offensive.
In short, yes this is invasive. But much like AI, this type of thing isn't going away, there is just going to be more lawsuits about it in the future.
That said, for a lot of subcontractor trades, it's so hard to find anyone that I'd worry about the reverse: you get known as "the freaks with the cameras" and no one good bids on your stuff anymore, and then the delivery is even more delayed.
I think economists would call that a feature and not a bug. It is essentially an auction (something economists LOVE). You could instead take that money that you're spending on surveillance and instead spend it on giving the contractors a bonus to show up to your place instead.
I really don't buy that this would "shame" them into coming to your place first. Everyone already is aware that they don't always show up because you got out bid. You're "solving" the problem the wrong way because you're not addressing the actual problem.
It was clear (our) GC was not used to this because they were constantly telling us that things were happening when they very clearly weren't (thanks to the live video we had from to the site).
I applaud you creating your own solution, many GCs can do this, but most can't or don't want to deal with it.
If a software startup assembles a bunch of open source hardware together and packages it as a product, would you say they don't "make" software?
No, I'd say they are more of a software company than a hardware company though. All software runs on some kind of hardware, but these days it is pretty rare for that hardware to be very unique or custom.
I was mostly just curious what custom hardware you had, since that was the topic at hand. My curiosity comes from working in the surveillance AI space for the last ~15 years, and having done a number of custom (as in we made the whole thing) cameras with AI, but now there is a trend more towards using a lightly OEM'd camera with custom firmware in many cases.
Considering the availability of cameras with advanced SoCs capable of doing edge inference, I wanted to ask more about your hardware and your design choices in this market, but I think I'll just bow out. Good luck with your startup!
Since we record motion on site, we typically catch the illegal dumpers, but it's hard to pick out from the many motion events that may occur on a construction site.
It's more about the fact that GCs struggle to get accurate schedules around when their subs will show up, the subs are in too high of a demand (think plumbers, electricians, framers). So they ask the subs to come out and complete a job and the sub responds with, "we'll be there sometime next week." Sometimes they show up, sometimes they don't. GCs need to know when and if they are showing up.
https://norphonic.com/products/evacsound/
Most of the userspace work including the planner, fire detection, resource scheduling and distributed execution is done in Common Lisp.
Most important thing is "ecosystem" to me, i.e. the logistics of ICs, PCB factories, upstream and downstream vendors, etc are all in the same place or city, I don't see anywhere in US that provides this yet.
I went to Shenzhen instead, which has everything a hardware startup dreamed of, COVID kind of screwed it up for me though, back to software stuff.
Lite-esp32 camera https://www.crowdsupply.com/maxlab/tokay-lite Source-code: https://github.com/maxlab-io/tokay-lite-pcb
Pro camera updats will be posted here: https://maxlab.io/store/tokay-riscv-camera/
Luxonis is way more powerful and has an Intel VPU (Movidius). It's not really meant to be a standalone platform, so it needs a host board (Linux SBC like the Pi). It takes a lot more power, but it can do 60fps on small Yolo models. Its resolution is a lot higher as well.
ESP32-S3 has a pretty small memory capacity, and doesn't have H264-H265 hardware encoding, so you'll be on low-res, low-fps. It only does MJPEG (AFAIK) streaming, so you'll also have to deal with high latency if you want to send that data somewhere. The big bonus is that it's low-cost and low-power, and you're running it directly on the core without an OS.
This means you can do stuff like sleep the cores until something wakes it up (like a PIR sensor that detects people), and it will start streaming in a second or two.
TL;DR: Luxonis stronk, but needs big batteries or plugged in. ESP32-S3 can run on small batteries or solar.
I'm desperately waiting for it to be available.
We’re interested in talking to people of all backgrounds who want to make Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology a near-term reality. Send us an email: hello@machinephase.systems
To be fair, simply being server a company that's easy to deal with is enough of a differentiator in this space. Would absolutely blindly buy from them just to avoid having to deal with HPE/Dell
I'm in the server business (within a very specific niche). I wish I could find more people like you.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P5Mk_IggE0
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552015
We use machine learning to monitor industrial equipment for signs of faults or failures, and identify in real-time which signals are relevant to the failure/which ones a technician should look at first. The problem we're solving is that when a machine fails unexpectedly, 60% or more of a technician's time is spent just figuring out what was going on and what, specifically, went wrong. We want to cut that time by half or more by having our device be an engineer-in-a-box monitoring the equipment 24/7/365. We're also unique in that we're "zero-cloud" - we do all data collection, storage & processing (yes, even the AI training - not just inference) on-device, on a COTS hardware platform that fits in your hand. The idea is to be truly plug-and-play without having to figure out network infrastructure, and cybersecurity, and data storage costs, etc. etc. Demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhtLS3UfnPU&feature=youtu.be
We're always interested in pilots; our website is admittedly fairly stealth mode, but if you know someone that works at a factory, they can reach out to forrest.shriver@sentineldevices.com
Hardware is definitely hard.
Huge # of products on Kickstarter are hardware.
Below is the tech focused offerings (but there is many more categories).
https://www.kickstarter.com/design-tech
More power to you if you're making a go of it.
Years ago, I worked on these, and it was so much fun, because of the variety of (smart) people involved, from tracing the light rays through the machine to motors, firmware, and all the rest. https://www.icare-world.com/us/product/icare-eidon/
It can display a google calendar.
You can also point it to any url that serves an image.
Is it okay to post a link?
https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...
I am planning to release more applications for it and I am opening the platform for 3rd party applications.
Plus there is Elektroschrottverordnung and Verpackungsrichtlinie and all that stuff.
You can send me an email at info@invisible-computers.com
PCB and screens are from China. The final assembly happens in my home.
I try to run a short supply chain to limit my inventory risk.
If you can write code and you don’t want to wait for me to add it to the default calendar app, you can build it and release it as a 3rd party app:
https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...
Looks pretty simple to do.
I imagine this might be a case of documentation and support as supposedly the app is already using the API endpoints we'd like to have.
Self-hostable backend (benefits: privacy; less trust required; I know it'll still be usable even if you shut down your backend in 5y) would of course be great but a separate thing to the above.
Ideally the device can create a wifi hotspot when it isn't setup that I can join and setup all the needed config settings. WLED does this as well https://kno.wled.ge/
https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...
And here is the sample app:
https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery
Admittedly, I am not the greatest technical writer, but I compensate by being pretty responsive. So if you have a question, just message me :)
Here is a guide on how to do it:
https://shop.invisible-computers.com/pages/outlook-calendar-...
Now my family can see my calendar easily.
Love the idea, will bookmark it for the future office!
Plus, I like the idea of plugging it in and never having to worry about it.
Still, I am thinking about adding a battery about twice per week, so it's definitely on my mind.
It looks great, though! Any good place to follow/subscribe for updates?
Larger displays are not excluded as a possibility, but I like the current size for placing it on the desk. Also, larger displays are disproportionately expensive, and the display is already the main cost driver.
Still going to keep an eye on it, though. I may end up talking myself (more accurately, my wife) into a smaller display.
Any chance of having mini HDMI input to use it as something like an Onyx Boox Mira?
Currently your Android app isn't available in Canada yet though
As a non-techy nerd it’s a perfect niche with built in usage and no need to hack. Thank you for posting.
Nice product, btw.
I fully agree with this assessment and I would love to hear more about your product.
I've see so a lot of jobs popping up related to SaaS for compliance right now, so things like helping companies stay on top of regulation and track their own efforts and initiatives. I do get the impression that a lot of it is done sincerely, but it does have a hint of ye olde 'selling shovels in a gold rush'.
Still, if it keeps people out of adtech and cryptocurrency it seems like a win.
At best, climate tech software makes the necessary hardware cheaper and more effective, or provides important data, but pure software plays in climate tech should be considered greenwashing scams until proven innocent.
With respect - I bet a dollar that the folk at Zoom have done more to reduce automotive pollution than your startup. No hardware startup could have enabled WFH in the absence of calendar, messaging & video conference software.
- As important as reducing our use of fossil fuels is, using less energy is not a solution to the problem of a non-renewable energy system. In that sense, it wouldn't meet the criteria for someone who wants to work on a climate solution.
- While WFH drastically reduces auto emissions, it increases gas & electricity use in the home.
- Zoom is not a mission-driven company and (to my knowledge) their KPIs are not directed at or correlated with their GHG footprint; I would think they see themselves as productivity software, not climate software.
- If Zoom never existed we would be working from home at the same rate, using any of hundreds of other video conferencing apps. In carbon offset terms, their impact does not provide additionality.
It required lots of material science, production techniques, supply chain adjustments, and a surprising amount of software (to model dynamic stress, and to run the robot and CNC trim paths). Once you get to the point you can clearly articulate your BOM and Specs to a manufacturer for MOQ=50, things get a lot easier. At the prototype stage we built everything ourselves, but now we use OEM manufacturers.
BOM: bill of materials, aka list of what it takes to manufacture a product
MOQ: minimum order quantity, the lower limit the manufacturer will accept
Are you saying that the expiration dates are bogus? I knew that rated sports helmets and similar products had expirations, but not car seats. Maybe I'll go check the handed-down seat my son is using...
And basically all thrift stores and other used good dealers won't touch them because of the perceived liability.
I'm fine sharing our used carseat with my 6yo only child's grandparents so that they can more easily help with my nieces and nephews (2 weeks, 1yo, 3yo, 4yo, and 5yo - oof!). My wife and I know it's not been in an accident, we would not misrepresent that to the detriment of our own family.
But I would not buy one from even the most trustworthy Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace listing imaginable.
I personally would love tamper-evident components within a carseat - think "Tip and Tell" [1] but for 3-axis accelerations. Impact-sensitive product labels exist such as those at [2], but I'm not convinced that the same accelerations and crashes that would damage polystyrene impact-absorbing foam would set off a glass ampule designed to break when you drop a rental camera lens or something like that.
1: https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-866/Damage-Indicators...
2: https://spotsee.io/impact
Pricing > It isn't for everyone. The Kioma seat is like a Maserati, but some people prefer a Ford Taurus. We have to charge a price to cover our production and design costs, and there is a quantitative and qualitative difference in the materials and performance of a Kioma car seat.
Perhaps not the best brand to invoke for a product where reliability is paramount. If you want to convey both luxury and reliability I'd go with Lexus (fancy Toyota).
Also car seats can't be used after a crash, even if visually they looked ok. Maybe they could be refurbished (new foam, etc), but obviously this is a liability concern and probably isn't worth it.
Weight > The total weight is probably similar at 10 pounds even. The company you mentioned likes to quote partial system weight and doesn't include the weight of their canopies and inserts. We've already made the lightest car seat in the world (2017, carbon fiber) at 5 pounds all in, and one of the lessons we learned was that adding weight can be a good performance trade if done well.
2. Ease of Installation (* see below)
3. Bauhaus Design
4. 1-Hand Operation
5. Ease of Cleaning
6. Built in Rocker (a full one)
7. Quiet (* see below)
* Safety > The US regs are pass/fail so lots of seats on the market have mediocre test scores that don't reflect the real danger of severe concussions. For those of you interested in digging into the obscure world of Head Injury Criterion: greater than 390 HIC is linked with severe concussions (Source: Proposed limits for HIC From Kleinberger et al., 1998, and Eppinger et al., 2000.) Kioma seats do a number of things (crumple zones, etc) to create a lower (better) HIC score. By comparison some of the top sellers in the industry are at 600+ HIC.
* Installation > The regs don't have standards that really address this, but the incredible complexity of legacy car seats has led to a lot of installation errors by parents and caregivers. This can lead to some really unpleasant outcomes and injuries. We designed KIOMA to minimize use and installation errors by making things as simple and intuitive as possible. This seat is optimized for lap belt use only (no base required). The companion base has a number of innovations too that make it intuitive and easier to use.
* Quiet > There are no clicking or snapping or button parts that wake a sleeping child (with the exception of the harness buckle). This is the quietest baby car seat made.
I'll give you some real numbers and leave the comparison for you to do (lawyers get itchy if we do the comparing directly). Our carbon fiber seat's best result is HIC 197 in FMVSS 213 testing with a Crabi 12-mo old test dummy. Our friend Eli at Magic Bean's reviewed it in a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGaU9R6jHCQ The current car seat for sale is of a similar class but doesn't have the $2500+ price tag of a carbon fiber seat.
If you're still curious, we can take this off HN: drop me a line at support@kioma.us and just mention HN and your HN profile name.
Reasons to use a base:
1) Convenience. It is nice and fast to click-in, click out with a car seat. Super fast and easy.
2) Protect the seat cushions of the car.
3) More constraints on pitch rotation. Which can be good or bad depending on how the seat is designed and rotation is used.
Reasons to use a lap belt only (no base):
1) It is intuitive. Everyone -- including grandma, grandpa, and the babysitter -- knows how to use a lap belt (as opposed to a latch/isofix base).
2) It is ubiquitous. Every automobile and plane seat has one. So if you're hopping into an Uber, no problem.
3) Lab belts are designed to stretch which is actually really good in a collision. The stretching lowers peak acceleration, and therefore lowers the likelihood of injury.
4) Total system weighs less, which translates into less force in a collision (F=ma).
Belt (1) troubles me slightly in that it’s easy but not necessarily intuitive enough for grandma to get it right every time (and indeed many don’t). The base has the great benefit of being definitively installed correctly (all goes green / stops beeping).
The reported numbers on belt errors are pretty terrible: https://www.besafe.com/child-car-seat-misuse-study/
You've hit the nail on the proverbial head regarding misuse. Misuse is a problem across installation types: belt-only, and with Latch/Isofix. Some people get so confused they install with both methods.
Lowering misuse is a top design goal. Stated differently: we want to make things so simple that people have to work hard to make a mistake.
You are absolutely correct that belt misuse is a problem (per the cited GDV study). Latch misuse is still a problem too, though.
The studies make clear that misuse is common across installation types, to various degrees. The studies don't do a great job of exploring why the misuse occurred (The 2005 NHTSA study below did ask some good follow up questions). For example, Why did someone not use the belt path correctly? Was it because the slot was too narrow? Was it not visually obvious? Why did someone install both the Latch/Isofix anchors onto the same mount point? Why did someone leave too much slack in the Latch/Isofix anchor or the seat belt? Etcetera. The reasons why people misuse a seat are very valuable to improved public education and improved product design.
NHTSA's 2005 large field study found 39% of CRS (aka baby car seats) were incorrectly installed with Latch. Many of those had multiple errors (e.g. twisted belt plus latch connector turned upside down). Table 11 has the details in https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/latch_report_12-...
10 years later, NHTSA's 2015 study with NCRUSS data found misuse was still persistent: "Overall misuse is considered as having at least one defined misuse present in the car seat or booster seat – the seat may have one or multiple misuses, where one misuse has the same contribution as multiple misuses. The overall misuse is estimated to be 46 percent with a 95 percent confidence interval ranging from 39 percent to 52 percent. By car seat or booster seat type, estimated misuse rates were 61 percent for forward-facing car seats, 49 percent for rearfacing infant car seats, 44 percent for rear-facing convertible car seats, 24 percent for backless booster seats, and 16 percent for highback booster seats." Source: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
So for all those parents out there, read your seat's user manual. The user manual will make it clear how to properly and effectively use the seat belt or the Latch/Isofix anchorages.
I think that situation is something many parents recognize. Usually when the baby is screaming etc.. wonderful.
Once you've click the base in, it's easy next time though. Yet, my wife still considers fitting the seat as the man's responsibility. :-)
I'm not sure if its a brand thing, but the isofix bolts on my last cars (Volvo, BMW, Audi) were all really well signposted, and in little plastic housings which you couldn't miss, even fumbling around. The ones on my wife's Ford are just sort of hiding behind the cushions, which doesn't seem as elegant.
I don't want to expose my child to exotic glues, adhesives, PFAS, or any other foreign molecules in their car seat.
How does your product stack up?
let me go pedantic and teach: "The customer is always right" does not mean that no matter what a customer says, you give them a false smile, and pretend you agree with them.
"The customer is always right" means "you are hearing actual feedback from your target audience; somebody giving attention to your product is experiencing friction and wants information or reassurance, and is taking the time to let you know"
Do you know how valuable that is? Most people exposed to your product (ads, PR, etc.) just move along. Customers who don't like your product generally just disappear.
Free market research should not be ignored. This customer is not only right, but is representative of a whole class of customers that you need to learn to win over.
Obviously, and outgassing happens a lot in any car especially if it's brand new. So I'll ask again - why drive kids in a car at all if this concerns them this much?
Because they have to
Genuinely confused what stance you're taking here
That a car is going to expose your child to an order of magnitude more "chemicals" than a baby seat ever could - it's like asking how much sugar is in your coleslaw that you're having on the side of a large five guys milkshake. Probably some, but if you're concerned about sugar you have much bigger things to worry about.
do you want to be right and nyah nyah nyah the guy, or do you want to sell him a carseat that you worked hard on that's safer than any other car seat you know? If your car seat is made of the same materials as every other car seat, or if by chance your car seat is actually safer than other car seats, why wouldn't you want to let them know rather than you telling the guy "you're an idiot for putting your kid in a car!"
all car seats go in cars. Wouldn't it be nice to have a car seat that did not add to the danger?
I don't want to sell him anything. Have you confused me with the OP maybe?
Every single purchase I make, I try to be as informed as possible.
Does this offend you?
That's not always true. If a certain subset of customers wants something ridiculous, they can either go elsewhere or learn to adapt. For better or worse, companies often times have the ability to drive public sentiment just as much as they have the responsibility to pander to it. When Apple removed headphone jacks from all their products they did so against a torrent of outrage, but fast forward 5-7 years and they absolutely made the right call. People learned to get over it.
Catering to bordering-on-harmfully-obsessive parents isn't always the best call.
I said listen to the customer because it is a legitimate point of contact, and they are not going to be the only one thinking what they're thinking, and even if you want to ignore them, you don't want to create a scene in front of other customers, so you can still think about and learn from the experience. The customer is always right from the customer's perspective, and you need to understand your customers' perspectives.
I wonder. Are you aware that keeping your living space exquisitely clean compromises the development of a childs immune system?
TLDR: We stack up really well.
1) No flame retardants are used in the upholstery. We worked really hard to meet the flammability requirements with materials that aren't doped in endocrine-disrupting flame retardants. So that was a big win, because that is the largest chemical exposure in legacy car seats (in my opinion) and it is one that the scientific literature is very clear about.
2) The chassis is mostly machined aluminum (powder-coated) and polycarbonate. On the underside of the chassis there are some bracket retention pieces that use a standard cyano-acrylic glue ("super glue").
Edit: sorry, let me rephrase that - not insane, just hard to justify.
For example, paying an extra $900 for a car seat, but then taking the kid on unnecessary car rides, which are magnitudes riskier than not taking the kid in a car. If you are willing to pay that much for such an immaterial decrease in risk, surely you should avoid taking the kid in a car unless absolutely necessary.
Although, I guess some of it is also showing what you can afford.
When it comes to driving specifically, my friends will buy a 50k SUV to feel safe, but will then buy cheapest plasticy tires or refuse to join me in advanced safety class.
That being said - kids are vulnerable, fragile, and don't make their own decisions. As a newish parent myself I 100% understand the extra pressure that puts to make the best possible decision for them.
So by all means, someone doing something or not doesn’t mean much.
Safety is a great way to sell this product, though the price may limit who buys it.
I used to know some of the Cybex people (it was a European company), and they congratulated us on beating their best safety scores at the time. Now Cybex is owned by an Asian conglomerate (Goodbaby).
The Kioma difference in materials quality and performance is both quantifiable and qualitative. We have to charge a price that covers our work in design and production costs. But I completely get it if the Kioma seat is too expensive for your preferences.
As a side note, if you want to be blown away by prices check out the $10,000 cribs (https://nurseryworks.net/collections/cribs/products/gradient...), $1000 bassinets (https://www.happiestbaby.com/), and $5000 strollers (https://silvercrossus.com/category/strollers/).
Thanks for the feedback!
I find it really interesting that you reached that conclusion. Me and my wife spent what feels like an absolutely insane amount of money on a car seat, definitely more than any of our friends have spent(the beforementioned Anoris-T, because as far as I can tell it is the best seat you can buy) and the idea of spending $1000 on a car seat just doesn't fit in my head. It's just too much.
>> but at least in this case I know that I'm getting value out of it
Really? how?
Like cheap end car seats when we looked were in the 200-400 and nicer ones were in the 600-1200 range.
We were gifted a hand me down and I had to cut the straps and bag it.
We ended up handing down the two infant sized ones we got that were the same model.
Also any car seat involved in a collision needs to be disposed of.
I dislike waste but you don’t mess with car seats and helmets.
My question is why it's $1000 and not $999.
The thing about the baby market is that, because it’s driven by emotional decisions, there are buyers at every price point - and it isn’t even directly related to wealth. Some people get into debt trying to make this harsh world safer for their newborn, even though safety benefits taper off as the price increases.
For me, I picked the lower bound and my wife picked the upper bound on the price range we were looking at. She is frugal above all else, I am safety conscious above all else. We met in the middle and found one that suited.
It required some negotiation to begin with though, because her upper bound was lower than my lower bound - and was firmly in the “dodgy unbranded wholesale, sold on a website with an invalid SSL certificate, claiming to be UK based but registered to a Chinese address” territory.
https://psychoautos.com/why-does-my-car-seat-have-an-expirat...
What is the “expiration date” on your seat?
But I get so frustrated with garbage on the market, and the struggle to find decent quality goods. I've created my own where they don't exist (eg. current limiter for plugging in laptop power brick on a plane, untrasonic eyeglass cleaner and dryer, tongue-activated mouse button) which is hugely labour intensive. If I need your thing, your thing is as good as you say, and you can sell it to me for less than that costs me in time, materials and lost opportunity, then for me the math is simple.
Having patents on innovations is necessary, but if you have innovations that will save kids lives, you should find a way to make those broadly usable by all.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10967762B2/en?oq=1096776...
This this TOS usual for a piece of regulated safety equipment?
Terms of service The legalese.
The KIOMA Car Seat is provided “as-is, where-is,” without representations, conditions or warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. The recipient or buyer is solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using the KIOMA Car Seat.
Patents > We don't work for free, and we can't buy groceries by giving away years of R&D. Companies are welcome to license our safety innovations, and they know how to reach us. The invitation to do so is on our website.
TOS > Kioma seats come with an industry standard 1 year warranty. The website TOS are different than the product warranty that comes with each seat. Thanks for the heads up though. I'll have the marketing team clarify that.
This is episode 1000 in our favorite series: why and how capitalism strangles innovation
In any case, I’m fine with companies making the pragmatic choice to pursue patent protection. But being defensive and flippant about it isn’t a good look. It’s much better to argue for instance that you put yourself at a disadvantage if you’re the only business that doesn’t patent their innovations, and that a patent portfolio also has a defensive function.
Not when you're a hardware company. You typically rely on external vendors and long feedback loops between iterations for development and have to pay people along the way and in-between. Your remark that someones is morally obligated to give their innovation away before R&D costs are paid for, or really at all outside of a licensing model, is so far left field it might have a seat with the cars.
What if a small player tries to break into a market with a nee solution? They should give away their IP to the big player purely because it has a positive impact on the world?
Just because their product is more safe doesn’t mean they automatically have to share this with everyone. They put time and a lot of effort into this, and that should be rewarded. The world rewards people with money. Sure some people might be happy with knowing they saved more lives, but eventually most people just want to be rewarded.
Yes. It’s bad to criminalize innovation. Most patentable innovations are not so unique but only a logical next step given prior inventions.
Also, patents favor the big players in any market because they have the money and the will to grind down any newcomers with legal action. The upstart with fewer resources should always be in favor of a level playing field.
It’s all well and good wanting the world to be a safer place, but every company is beholden to its shareholders and debtors. Resources spent must be recovered or it all falls down.
Do you want to know what is the active substance of a new medicine? Do you want other researchers to know it and critique it, and build upon it? And for FDA to have easy time learning everything about the medicine? Allow the medicine to be patented.
Otherwise every other factory would start producing it, having not paid anything for years of R&D. Nobody would be able to secure a loan or investment for said R&D, and especially stuff like clinical trials.
The alternative is trade secrets, quakery, and loss of knowledge forever if a particular project fails.
Patents have their downsides. The fee structure could be different (progressive with time), the duration can be discussed, some areas should rather not be patentable (large families of substances, or software), but the idea is pretty sound and important.
no, individuals should play by the sames rules of the collective as everybody else.
There is nothing wrong with you advocating and/or successfully changing the rules of the patent system so all players must behave this way, but trying to shame a small entrepreneur into being boy scout is ihmo bad for all of us. I bristle at all the moralizing people do on the daily.
I'm advocating for "think globally, act locally", just without puritanism or maoism.
That's not how our Recaro seat works, nor our original baby seat, nor the booster for our older son. Each of them attaches to the seat anchors using a single strap with clips on either end, one on a length adjuster.
This design looks pretty much the same; the plywood is just protection for the car upholstery, and doesn't act as a load-bearing element.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isofix
One way would be for you to buy or license the tech and give it away. Is that something you're considering?
Why not make one that's solid steel and can tank a direct hit from a bus? You could make some really funny advertisements with crash test dummies.
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 :)
2. We cannot currently sell directly into Europe, though we'd love to at some point. If you're a distributor please drop me a line!
In all seriousness, the problem with donations is people are afraid of attached liability. It is a shame, because car seats can often be used for several years across multiple children. If you keep it in the family and use it across your own kids, everyone is cool with it. As soon as you donate it to someone else, people worry about liability.
I know it isn't much solace, but we try to minimize use of non-recyclable material. The 5 pounds of aluminum in a Kioma car seat is recyclable and will net about $4.00 at current Al spot rates. So you could disassemble it.
I see two main issues.
1. That clearly requires the installer to apply non-trivial force to lock it into place. Beyond it being awkward, a Graco Keyfit is a drop in, no force install. Amazing.
2. In most vehicles, fire-aft distance is a huge, limiting factor. It seems difficult, if not impossible to tell if the seat has latched into the correct position, without additional tilt. The Keyfit base makes this obvious since it will not latch into place at incorrect angles.
Force > To use the base, yes some force is required. In our opinion, you want force to prevent false-positives on latching. False positives are a big problem with bases, as people perceive latching to have occurred when it actually has not. Visual latching indictors are not sufficient, in my opinion. Our experience and design encourages audio, visual, and tactile feedback to minimize misunderstandings and false positives.
Please note that while a base is convenient (people like the quick click-in, click-out of bases) it is not needed. You can just use the seat belt. Roll with whatever you prefer. Personally, I just use the seat belt.
Fire-aft> I have no idea what you mean by "fire-aft distance". But it sounds like you are worried about angles. We designed the seat to encourage good angles at rest, whether with the lap belt alone or with the companion base. Most automotive seats have a 5-10 degree upward angle. A rear-facing infant car seat should be resting in place at no lower than a 30 degree angle, and no higher than a 45 degree angle. If you go too high it increases choking risk but conversely improves the crash test scores. If you go lower it is better for a baby at rest and has less choking risk, but worsens the crash test score as more force is distributed into a smaller area and less rotation of the seat is possible. All this to say, there is a lot of variability across vehicles and seats in a vehicle, and to the best of my knowledge no car seat base accounts for all the permutations well. Regardless, angles are important because babies (especially younger ones) are still developing the muscles that hold up their head and have less head control than it might appear. For the parents out there, the final back angle should be approximately between 30 and 45 degrees as measured from a level plane, but please refer to your seat's user manual for its instructions. In most scenarios and vehicles the Kioma car seat should rest at an approximate 40 degree angle.
Competitor Comparison > We try to avoid direct comparisons with other companies, because it makes the lawyers wince. However, while I'm biased, from my personal experience I can say I'd take the Kioma any day over the competitors. There are many reasons we built this product, and none of them included "existing [insert company name] does a great job at this!"
Sorry, darn auto-correct on my phone.
"Fore-aft" distance is what I meant. Essentially, the distance from the back of the child's seat to the driver's seat. In nearly all vehicles we own (including mid-sized SUVs), it's a close fit to install a baby carrier. In some cases, the front seats will be pressing against the carrier (unavoidable in some cases). With a full base, it's very obvious when the carrier is being pushed up too far by the contact and we need to adjust.
The Kioma seat is about a standard length, and the width is narrower than competing seats while fitting the same size baby.
Fun fact: the International Standards Organization (ISO) helpfully defined several envelope sizes (r1, r2, etc) to help with baby car seat standardization, and the EU crash regs (see UN r129) even have a test bar that represents the back of a driver's seat.
It looks good , the materials seem fine , but have nobody heard about ISOFix? At least in europe is standard in new cars.
The last baby seat that I used , manufactured by MassiCossi , had a better base than yours, with an adjustable aluminium leg and ISOFix links that kept it sturdly attached to the seat frame.
It was not cheap too, around 500 euro I think.
It was also removable with the press of a button , from the base and from the trolley
Edit: I missed a comment referencing it, then it seems strange to me that a seat sold as somewhat of a luxury item doesn'support that
Kioma does provide an Isofix detachable base, but in the U.S. it is called Latch. Same thing, different name. All U.S. infant child restraint systems (CRS) must either have Latch attachments permanently to the CRS or must provide a separate detachable Latch base.
So we do provide a Latch base. We don't do a base load-leg though, because there are some cool things done with rotation to dissipate energy :) This is one case where the EU regs specified an implementation rather than a result. Otherwise the EU (r129) regs are very well written.
Leftover investment memo: https://www.notion.so/gethuan/Huan-Memo-1e6ee1d17d72440cb981...
Most of the activity is not being generated by Americans or in America. Lots are being started in India, Dubai and China. Even the ones based out of the US or Singapore spend most of their time in Shenzen.
In the US, I routinely see robotics and Healthcare hardware startups in Boston or San Diego, pseudo attached to the local university. No surprise that irobot and Boston dynamics are based out of Boston.
There are tons of small companies making hardware for oil & gas applications, but you'll mostly find them in areas where their customers are located (e.g. Texas, Alberta) and/or LCOL cities where you can find cheap real estate. This also applies to other industries like agriculture and automotive.
These aren't "sexy" companies so you don't hear much about them, but I'd wager that if you add them up, they'd outnumber the number of hardware startups in NYC and the Bay Area.
In my experience, they normally get started and funded by local people in their industry and they sell back to local customers (at least initially) from their network, so there's very little in the way of advertising, especially at a national level. Also, they often hire from their network for early positions and local colleges/universities as they grow, so you might not even see them on job boards.
If you're looking for companies that are a bit more established, you could try industry trade shows.
Agree. Lived in SG for 14 years, worked for hardware startups for 8 of those. There really isn't much going on HW wise.
My experience has been that if you work with the government on a project, as if by magic, ST Engineering comes up with a competing product within 1-2 years.
I am on the UAS committee for a large city (1.6m+ people with 13k+ employees) and its amazing how many us-based companies don't take into account how hot it can be in the desert. I recently saw a vendor who needed to redesign/change their batteries and motors because of it.
As some unsolicited advice, if you aren't working to get on the DIU Blue list [1], I highly recommend it. Many if not most public safety agencies are using that to make purchasing decisions.
I have been sounding the alarm on how DJI is likely going to get banned at some point with all the trade shenanigans going on, but many of the US based companies just aren't as operator friendly.
[1] - https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas
See current open roles here: https://jobs.lever.co/thalolabs
I'm really excited for Espressif (the chip maker) to roll out newer versions of their microcontrollers on RISC-V. I would love to see a renaissance of inexpensive personal devices.
[1]: We're pre-launch so nothing to share now.
https://sense.com
$165 will get you an emporia with 16 sensors so you don't need any AI trying to decipher your usage, compared to $300 for yours that only gives you sensors for your main feed.
Considering it's trivial to find schematics online showing how to wire a clamp current meter into an esp32, what have you found to be difficult about the hardware? I would expect the AI detection of individual appliances would be the hard part.
Do you have any plans regarding always on load? So hard to track it down…