What are /r/hwstartups' favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

My experience might be a bit older, but two years ago I had opportunity to visit Hua-chan-bay in Shenzhen, biggest market for electronics and electronic components in south Asia. What I found is a sea of all sorts of stores that sold everything under the sun in terms of electronic components. However, later I found that visiting taobao.com yielded best results in terms of time being spent since you can contact sellers directly there. Or another option would be to use http://www.alibaba.com/ to get information on how to order large batches.

It may seem that going to electronics market would be good idea, considering that you can get your components right away. What is not ideal is traveling time and physically moving around three 6+ floor buildings trying to find supplier for your components. Even if you happen to find supplier, you may not get components in specified quantity.

Delivery in Shenzhen is often either same day or day after if you order from taobao.com and seller resides in Shenzhen . Often sellers will not assign shipping fee if you politely ask about it or buy sufficiently enough not to warrant it ($10+). You will get shipping fee if parts are heavy, like stepper motors or if you buy bulky item.

If you need it to be running full Linux with access to peripherals here's a list of them here: http://www.opencircuits.com/Motherboards_that_run_Linux.

If all you need is a compute engine there are a few other options that run an embedded scripting language like the Espruino or the MicroPython pyboard.

There's also this ESP8266 thing: http://hackaday.com/2014/08/26/new-chip-alert-the-esp8266-wifi-module-its-5/. Folks are flashing it with NodeMCU and running Lua on it. You can pick them up for < $5 if you search around.

Again, depends on what you need it for.

BTW the Artik 10 has a multi-core CPU, on-board GPU, and a bunch of radios. I'd be surprised if it's priced below the Edison.

Read this: http://hackaday.com/2016/09/19/preparing-your-product-for-the-fcc/

You technically can't advertise a product in the US unless it has FCC approval, but this is done all the time anyway. You should start the FCC approval process now, since it can take a few months and if it fails you'll have to make changes to your design. You may be able to find a testing lab that can do the filing and testing in conjunction with the CE testing; two birds with one stone.

If you are using a pre-certified module for your wireless component, you've made your life a whole lot easier, and it's possible that you may be able to just test for unintentional emissions, which is a lot cheaper and easier than the full intentional emissions testing.

I occasionally keep my eyes on a few dozen, but haven't updated my list in a while.

Two easy-to-use recommended data sources: Google Search Trends (put the names of a few companies/products individually in quotes as a comma-separated list), and Alexa Traffic Rank (put in the domain name of each company).

For B2C companies, this will give you a decent relative barometer. (For B2B, not so much, generally.) Next, you can search for some more-well-known hardware startups/products as calibration to help put that relative ranking into perspective.

I like these sources because they avoid the PR hype machine, they ignore the "funding rounds" circus, and just ask the question: are people online actually looking for whatever it is? (And that question is usually very correlated to revenue.)

Looks like a scam at the very worst, or people trying to get funding to make a prototype that actually works.

Lots of info and discussion here: http://hackaday.com/2015/10/01/ask-hackaday-i-love-the-smell-of-burnt-hair-in-the-morning/

Basically the physics don't add up.

$35,000 would get you a fairly good used machine. You would probably have to refurbish it in some fashion. I would check http://www.alibaba.com/ for new machines and ebay for used machines.

Most of my moulding is done in China, cheapest labor you can find with fairly good quality moulding. Each mould I usually pay $6k to $15k depending on the complexity and size. The mould bases I usually get can create a volume of 6in by 6in by 2in high, however the machine it is used on depends on the volume of plastic to be injected. If you inject a larger volume of plastic you will need a machine that can hold the mold base together when the plastic is injected.

These machines can do a wide variety of plastics, ABS, PC, PC/ABS, Acrylic, Nylon, Poly(anything).

What type of plastics do you expect to be shooting? Do you plan on large volume? Why do you need a plastic injection moulding machine? There are a bunch of resins (2 part) that are used in low volume production that are pretty good quality. These don't require an expensive machine to inject plastic into the mould, furthermore the moulds are really inexpensive to create.

"Everything you do is open source" is a bit different from the "100% open source" your website describes the Imp as.

I'm sure your intentions are honest, but it is important to not be misleading. Not many ARM machines have open source graphics drivers, the Raspberry Pi being a notable exception, but that was 2 years after its release.

Interesting, you built your own database or are you piggybacking on LIRC or someother? I can't image build up all the codes on your own... The other way to do this is just record and playback. Built something similar a while back that worked like this but before BLE was as popular: http://hackaday.com/2012/12/14/webmote-control-anything-with-web-based-remote/ https://github.com/dandroid88/webmote

The SanDisk Connect Stick has been out for a while.... http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/16/sandisk-connect-wireless-stick/

You can get the 64GB flavor on Amazon for $40: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZCFYF2W/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_18?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1&amp;smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

Some books I found useful:

"From Concept to Consumer: How to Turn Ideas Into Money" - Phil Baker

"Making It: Manufacturing Techniques for Product Design" - Chris Leften

"Prototyping and Low-Volume Production" - Rob Thompson

"The Design of Everyday Things" - Don Norman

"Zero to Maker" - David Lang

Quora has some hidden gems; plenty of experienced and smart people writing things about their experiences with hardware.

Don't try to do too much of what you don't know enough about, whether it's industrial design, electrical engineering, prototyping, mechanical engineering, etc. At the end of the day, there's a reason those people exist and get paid well: they know things and do things that you can't. Founders (myself included) by their nature are people that have a strong impulse to do as many things as they can, you have to let parts of the process go to people more capable and more knowledgeable than you.

Caution: Self-Promotion

A documentary series that I produced all about entrepreneurship and startups was created to show people what it takes to startup and succeed (or fail), it's called "Startupland" and you can find it at Startupland.TV :-) Many from around the world have enjoyed it thoroughly, and told us that is was valuable to them.

Disclaimer: I don't claim to know what I'm talking about.

> *Should we keep on adding services to the keyboard, or we should focus just on one service such as payments on the keyboard, or e-commerce on the keyboard.

My first thought on seeing this is that you'll be competing with Gboard (Google's keyboard), so you'll need a better proposition than a "smart keyboard that does things". Hence, I would pick one specific service or area and get really good at that, rather than having the keyboard do a lot of things. The "keyboard that helps you save" (for instance) sounds a hella lot more appealing than "the smart keyboard", particularly in the context of competing against Gboard.

> *Should we restrict this idea to the keyboard, or try to implement this on Quickball (assistive touch) kind of thing, which could be accessible throughout the phone rather than just messaging services.

I would just pick one thing, otherwise it's putting too much too quickly on your plate. If you had to pick one (custom keyboard or quickball thing) which one would do the job best? Then stick to that.

> *What should be our monetizing plan.

I would suggest none (for now). If you can afford it, I would try and get a few thousand people to use it and give feedback before you start thinking about monetizing it. Eventually if you get people using it you can always add premium features on top, but at this stage you need to find out if people want it first and foremost.

(Also, uh, this sub is /r/hwstartups, for hardware startups, you should have probably posted on /r/startups instead)

We're building a neuroscience education platform based on modular, tabletop electronic neuron elements. We're finalists in this thing which is exciting. Check it out at Maker Faire San Diego.

NeuroTinker

I like the concept, and it's a neat little piece of hardware, but why would someone use this over something like AirDroid or similar?

Your landing page could use a little work. This is obviously your first product so it should be central to your landing page. You've spent the time making an explainer video, so why not have it immediately available to people as they arrive at your site? People don't want to have to go clicking around to figure out what your website is about. Have a look through some other sites on betalist for some good examples of product landing pages.

There's a great biography of the Stevenson's fight to build the first railway, really interesting to see how the invested interests of the canal system refused to see the coming change. https://librivox.org/lives-of-the-engineers-george-and-robert-stephenson-by-samuel-smiles/

You can check out Primaseller for order management, inventory management and purchase order management. They have a B2B panel too for managing orders from your suppliers. They are priced quite reasonably, you can check it out here https://www.primaseller.com/pricing?ov=u

Yea, LOTS of people are thinking about this type of problem - call it GitHub for hardware. They're doing more GUI based stuff though: http://GrabCAD.com and http://Sunglass.io are the major ones.

Do you care to elaborate on what you're thinking?

You are trying to package up something like Openhub (https://www.openhab.org/). Take a look there and see how much is the hardware that supports their environment. I would also not try to reinvent the wheel, as there are plenty of environments out there from Control4 to OpenHub.

Yeah. OrangePI seems to have the most options: Go through their various "models". Their software support is somewhat shoddy but you can't beat the price and since the hardware is fully open source you can manufacture.

See this one for example: http://www.orangepi.org/OrangePii96/

It's a little underpowered but it has wifi and a camera module slot.

Google "arduino trackpad" and "arduino touchpad"

Lots of good documentation and example code out there.

https://www.hackster.io/BuildItDR/arduino-controlled-usb-trackpad-f443a6

Alright, they never ended up publishing it somehow. I have just done an interview myself yesterday. Might be worth listening too if you are interested in tuning your crowdfunding campaign. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141104023858-35491639-how-to-raise-90-000-on-kickstarter-martin-kessler-spills-his-guts

We're making Flic: The wireless Smart button. (https://flic.io) Highway1 was amazing actually. We're Swedish so much added value was because it was in San Fransisco. They helped us with everything from pulling off the perfect pitch to making the product and brand ready for launch. We got a huge and valuable network from our experience as well. I can really recommend to apply!

I think this is the best answer here. I recommend OnShape for making CAD drawings, it's parametric and, you can get a free trial, has a bunch of tutorial videos and it's got a wide range of addons for sheet metal fabrication.

&#x200B;

Once you have your file, it would be a simple process of laser cutting the parts out, and then either bending (much like a cardboard box) or bolting/welding the pieces together. There are plenty of places in the US that handle sheet metal fabrication, so I'm sure you can find a place locally. Otherwise, there's companies like Parmetric or Protocase, that can give you a quote very quickly.

&#x200B;

Have a look over this tutorial for some helpful tips designing a case, and this video for the basics in designing sheet metal files.

&#x200B;

Wish you the best of luck in your journey, and feel free to PM for any advice!

ME/MFG Engineer @ 9 person startup of 2 yrs

Our PCBs have a bluetooth daughterboard, so our boards are already technically uniquely identified by the time they come to us. What's nice is the MFGr of the bluetooth chips put a datamatrix on the outside of the RF shield that contains the last 6 digits of their UUID. So we use those to track our boards.

For ~1.5 yrs we used a google sheet, which we added more and more smarts to over time: conditionally formatting to highlight errors or inconsistencies, outside programs using google's APIs to help automate a bit of it. Once we got to ~300-400 units being tracked this way, all of the formulas and calculations ended up being so slow, that it forced me to write a database backed admin app with custom functions to do all the tracking. It helps enforce the process that I've been working on and refining for about a year, and allows access for multiple users to be working on it at a time, to help scale up production efforts. (Granted this is about low volume prototyping).

I wouldn't suggest doing this at the outset for obvious reasons - your process is going to change a LOT. Always good to think about how you can make your process eventually more easily transition into the next iteration, though. It can save you a lot of work down the road. Some compromises might be something like fieldbook or airtable.

These are a bit short for you but they're the only ones I've used from Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017XHINGU/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apap_iGaf8skibfSZ3

I've had LOTS of luck finding these on Alibaba I'd recommend checking there if you're buying a few

No problem:

A router table is just a hand-held router that has been mounted to the underside of a table with the bit sticking up above the table. You can get ones with all sorts of adjustments or you can make one out of plywood.

Here's a video showing someone using one: https://youtu.be/jamwRhQTJbA

I expect YouTube to offer you similar videos of people building their own tables. They're a simple device once you own the router - you just want your surfaces to be sturdy, flat, and square to each other.

For your situation (a circle), I'd put a small board perpendicular to the backstop at a distance of 1 radius from the center of the blade. That way you can put your plastic housing up against 2 guides (the backstop, and this board) and spin it in place. Buy a router bit with the taper you want (example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KZM1BTC/ref=psdc_3116541_t3_B001CGYOTY I'm not endorsing those, I just did an image search and selected one that showed a variety of angles)

http://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-100V-240V-Adapter-Support-PS-5V4W/dp/B0128TW666/ref=sr_1_9?s=electronics&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1464913872&amp;sr=1-9&amp;keywords=5vdc+white

May not be the right size barrel...

This relies a lot on contract work, I would try to partner with someone who knows or learn as much as you can. Much of what you want is not difficult but is somewhat time consuming to learn. I'd recommend giving Prototype to Product a read. It was just published this year and gives a really great overview of developing a hardware product from the ground up including cert info.

Also FYI, you should use a pre-certified module for wifi and not design in the wifi yourself. The pain to get a working design and the extra $10k to certify it with the FCC isn't worth it unless you're selling a lot of units.

For first prototype, first product I would advise against bringing on a specialist. These guys have 1001 problems to solve. That kind of deep dive comes later after you nail product market fit.

1) Scour your network of friends of friends to find someone who has done acoustics before.

2) Look for analogous products released by large corporations that would have put in this kind of work. Scavenging an iPhone5S speaker was a smart idea. Also look for portable voice conferencing solutions like this Philips "WeCall" - similar constraints and they would have done the hard work for you: http://www.amazon.com/Philips-Bluetooth-Conference-AECS7000-37/dp/B00HH0ESYK or something similar (that was literally just the first result for "portable bluetooth voice conferencing").

I discovered that foam boarding is a really inexpensive way of creating "good-enough looking" prototypes.

For ex: http://www.amazon.com/Foamwerks-Channel-Straight-WC-6010-Freestyle/dp/B00UUEA85S?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1&amp;redirect=true&amp;ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage

offers a range of precision cutting tools to be able to build a decent prototype. I was hardly a sculptor or anything but was able to quickly create a good looking prototype in a day.

This is cool! Any word on price/resolution/weight/lumens/contrast/etc? I presently use one of these for my travel work and am pretty happy with it. I worry that the big frame won't play nicely with road-warrior work spaces... I can't imagine the people next to me at the coffee shop bar would be happy with my inflatable screen. Do you have more information on your target use cases?

I hope this is constructive, and I look forward to seeing your campaign when it launches.

This comment is full of great advice - thanks for that.

I don't want to release a lot of info about my product, however it is really comparable to a 3D printer in that the electronics are mainly to control many motors precisely.

I'm currently prototyping with an Arduino. I assume transitioning from Arduino to some other embedded system might be challenging hardware wise.

You seem very knowledgeable about electronics production, so Id like to ask you about limit switches (something that tells the motors to stop at a position). Originally I had planned to use micro limit switches, but then I found the photo interrupter which is what my 3D printer uses, however, I've people have recommended hall effect sensors over photo interrupters for their reliability, but to my knowledge using a hall effect sensor means sticking a magnet on to the end of the thing that is moving. Have you worked with any of these and have any input?

Again, thanks so much.

basically looking for http://www.amazon.com/ProSelect-Metal-Card-Holder-3-Inch/dp/B001VP5A9O

but different dimensions to hold business sized cards. i'd need it cut/bent and then i will paint/powder coat locally.