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Ask HN: How do I get a hardware idea made? (by someone else..)
11 points by tomsaffell on Nov 10, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments
There's an electronic gizmo that I'd like to own (details below). I dont have the time to design it myself, nor the time to market and it and sell it if someone else designs and makes it. So basically I just want to put out the idea and hope that someone else will pick it up and make it (I realize ideas are ten-a-penny, and execution is key, but it's still worth a shot...) How best can I do that? Is there somewhere I can post such an idea?

The idea is a clock that is waterproof, talking, which automatically turns on when the shower starts. The usage scenario would be:

  user starts shower
  clocks turns itself on, says 'hi'   
  5 minutes after turn-on the clock says "that's 5 minutes"
  at some times clock announces the time e.g. "the time is 8.45am"
  10 minutes after turn-on the clock says "that's 10 minutes", etc....
  user turns off the shower, clocks stops talking.
  I'd pay around 20 bucks for such a thing.
* - maybe the clock could listen for the sound of the shower, or sense humidity or temperature changes


http://www.quirky.com/ is a place that takes ideas for physical products and tries to fund their production by getting people to pre-order. The products seem a little silly, but it is a great looking site and an interesting way to approach funding.


There is a start-up here in Cambridge, MA that was founded by a couple of MIT Grad Students called Course Zero Automation:

http://www.coursezero.com/

I've talked with them about their rates for working on physical device start-ups with me before. And, they were very reasonable. I know both of the founders and they're highly skilled and highly competent. They initially founded the company to compete on the DARPA prizes related to military device needs (specifically non-GPS navigation).

I'd highly recommend them if you're looking for engineers to do the consulting work necessary to develop a device like this.

Also, I like your idea. Green is big right now, and this is both an energy savings and water savings play. If you developed the device in a way that allowed it to shut off water flow after a given amount of time, you may be able to market it to large government markets such as federal and state prisons and the US military. One of the military challenges presented to MIT students this year was for a device capable of cleaning and disinfecting clothing with a very limited amount of water. In current battle field theaters, the US Military is really struggling with the logistics of troop water supply.


Hey this is a relatively simple hack. If you're not looking for finesse and would go with anything that works, this could be done in a couple of hours.

Also, rather than looking for sounds or temperature (which can easily produce a lot of false positives), you could simply make your tap into a switch and use it to trigger the clock.


I'd actually look at sound. Shower noise has got to be pretty close to white noise. A little microphone and some filtering code to distinguish showering from other things, and you'd be in business.


Put a flowswitch in the upstream line.

Electricity and bathrooms don't mix.


And then have it report gallons of water used rather than time. And then sell it to me, because then I'd buy it too.

For added fun, estimate natural gas or electricity usage based on the type of water heater installed. Ok, so that would take this way past simple.


A flowswitch is a binary device, it is used in central heating systems to make sure the water is moving when the pump engages, if the pump has failed the flowsitch won't trip so the heater will display a 'friendly' error code instead of burning a bunch of gas for nothing, possibly damaging the burner.

It is simply used as a failsafe.

There are vane based systems that will report actual flow rather than just whether flows or not.

Usually these work with a vane with a little magnet embedded, every revolution of the vane counts for so much water. They're not very accurate though (+- 20% or so, especially if the flow rates vary in a wide range).

A simple hall-effect sensor will act as the pickup on the outside of the copper or plastic housing that contains the vane assembly.

You can get calibrated ones too, these are used in places like gas stations. Those are pretty expensive though.


I just keep an oven timer in the bathroom for showers, e.g., something like this: http://littlebabylump.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/oven-timer...


I like it! why over engineer a solution when you don't have to




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