Mademoiselle Pinball Table Gets Rock ‘n Roll Makeover

July 13, 2018 by 11 Comments

Once upon a time, there was a music venue/artist collective/effects pedal company that helped redefine industry in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. That place was called Death By Audio. In 2014, it suffered a death by gentrification when Vice Media bought the building that DBA had worked so hard to transform. From the ashes rose the Death By Audio Arcade, which showcases DIY pinball cabinets made by indie artists.

Their most recent creation is called A Place To Bury Strangers (APTBS). It’s built on a 1959 Gottlieb Mademoiselle table and themed around a local noise/shoegaze band of the same name that was deeply connected to Death By Audio. According to [Mark Kleeb], this table is an homage to APTBS’s whiz-bang pinball-like performance style of total sensory overload. Hardly a sense is spared when playing this table, which features strobe lights, black lights, video and audio clips of APTBS, and a fog machine. Yeah.

[Mark] picked up this project from a friend, who had already cut some wires and started hacking on it. Nearly every bit of the table’s guts had to be upgraded with OEM parts or else replaced entirely. Now there’s a Teensy running the bumpers, and another Teensy on the switches. An Arduino drives the NeoPixel strips that light up the playfield, and a second Uno displays the score on those sweet VFD tubes. All four micros are tied together with Python and a Raspi 3.

If you’re anywhere near NYC, you can play the glow-in-the-dark ball yourself on July 15th at Le Poisson Rouge. If not, don’t flip—just nudge that break to see her in action. Did we mention there’s a strobe light? Consider yourself warned.

Want to get into DIY pinball on a smaller scale? Build yourself a sandbox and start playing.

Continue reading “Mademoiselle Pinball Table Gets Rock ‘n Roll Makeover” →

Ask Hackaday: Selling Yourself As A Hacker

July 17, 2017 by 84 Comments

While there are plenty of hackers that hack just for the love of it, it’s no secret that many of us are looking to hit it big someday. Tales of the businesses like HP and Apple that started in someone’s garage inevitably lead to musings like, “Hey, I’ve got a garage!” and grand plans to turn that special idea into the Next Big Thing™. Many will try, most will fail for one reason or another, but hope springs eternal, and each new widget seems to start the entrepreneurial cycle again.

But for as much pressure as we may feel to be the next Packard, Wozniak, or Musk, not everyone is cut out to be the boss. Some of us have no interest in or aptitude for business — we don’t want to hire or fire people, we don’t want to wheel and deal, and we certainly don’t want to worry about salesmanship. Some of us just want to abstract all that complexity away and just find a job, preferably one that leverages the things we love to do.
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Will It Sell?

June 29, 2017 by 86 Comments

Many of us develop things for one of two purposes: to hack something cool, or to sell something cool. When hacking something cool, your target market is yourself, and you already know you’ve made the sale. If your goal is to sell the thing you are making, then a lot more thought and effort is required. You could develop the coolest product in the world, but if your target market is too small, your price is too high, your lead time is too long, or any of a dozen other factors is not quite right, you’ll be spending a lot of time and effort on what will amount to a huge disappointment. The Hackaday Prize Best Product has many great examples which let us study some of these success factors, so let’s take a look. Continue reading “Will It Sell?” →

Shmoocon 2017: The Ins And Outs Of Manufacturing And Selling Hardware

January 17, 2017 by 29 Comments

Every day, we see people building things. Sometimes, useful things. Very rarely, this thing becomes a product, but even then we don’t hear much about the ins and outs of manufacturing a bunch of these things or the economics of actually selling them. This past weekend at Shmoocon, [Conor Patrick] gave the crowd the inside scoop on selling a few hundred two factor authentication tokens. What started as a hobby is now a legitimate business, thanks to good engineering and abusing Amazon’s distribution program.

The product in question is the U2F Zero, an open source U2F token for two-factor authentication. It’s built around the Atmel/Microchip ATECC508A crypto chip and is, by all accounts, secure enough. It’s also cheap at about $0.70 a piece, and the entire build comes to about $3 USD. All of this is hardware, and should be extremely familiar to the regular Hackaday reader. This isn’t the focus of [Conor]’s talk though. The real challenge is how to manufacture and sell these U2F dongles, a topic we looked in on back in September.

The circuit for this U2F key is basically just a crypto chip and a USB microcontroller, each of which needs to be programmed separately and ideally securely. The private key isn’t something [Conor] wants to give to an assembly house, which means he’s programming all these devices himself.

For a run of 1100 units, [Conor] spent $350 on PCB, $3600 for components and assembly, $190 on shipping and tariffs from China, and an additional $500 for packaging on Amazon. That last bit pushed the final price of the U2F key up nearly 30%, and packaging is something you have to watch if you ever want to sell things of your own.

For distribution, [Conor] chose Fulfillment By Amazon. This is fantastically cheap if you’re selling a product that already exists, but of course, [Conor]’s U2F Zero wasn’t already on Amazon. A new product needs brand approval, and Amazon would not initially recognize the U2F Zero brand. The solution to this was for [Conor] to send a letter to himself allowing him to use the U2F Zero brand and forward that letter to the automated Amazon brand bot. Is that stupid? Yes. Did it work? Also yes.

Sales were quiet until [Conor] submitted a tip to Hacker News and sold about 70 U2F Zeros in a day. After that, sales remained relatively steady. The U2F Zero is now a legitimate product. Even though [Conor] isn’t going to get rich by selling a dozen or so U2F keys a day, it’s still an amazing learning experience and we’re glad to have sat in on his story of bootstrapping a product, if only for the great tip on getting around Amazon’s fulfillment policies.

[Geohot] Selling His “Self-Driving” Car Tech For $1k By New Year

September 17, 2016 by 58 Comments

This week [Geohot] announced the launch of his self-driving car hardware. This is the natural extension of his proof-of-concept shown off in December which he parlayed into a Silicon Valley startup called comma.ai. [Geohot], whose real name is [George Hotz], is well known for jailbreaking the iPhone and making Sony look like idiots when they retroactively crippled Linux support on PS3. He has hardware chops.

Initial self-driving add-on hardware only works with Honda and Acura models that already have lane-keeping assist features because those vehicles already have built-in front radar. The package, which replaces the rear view mirror, adds a front facing camera. Those lucky (or brave, foolish, daring?) beta users can trade $999 and $24/month for what is currently a green 3D printed enclosure with some smartphone-like hardware inserted.

The company has taken an interesting approach to acquiring data needed for this particular flavor of self-driving. [Hotz] is teasing a chance at beta test invites to those who contribute driving data to the company. This is as simple as downloading an app to your phone and letting it roll from your windshield as you go bumper to bumper from Mountain View to San Francisco. That’s right, the plan is to support just that stretch of the nation’s highway system — although [Hotz] did make a brazen estimate of 90% of commutes for 90% of users within a year. Hey, it’s a startup so it’s either that, selling to a bigger fish, or closing their doors.

That narrow route support is actually an interesting constraint. In fact, the company is most interesting because of its chosen constraints: a small subset of cars, a chosen stretch of highway, and dare we say sanity when it comes to self-driving expectations. Grandiose claims have the general public thinking a vehicle with no human driver will slide up to your stoop and take you anywhere you want to go. That is a dauntingly difficult engineering challenge (dare we say impossible). What [Hotz] is selling is a more stress-free commute, not a nap in the back seat. You still need to be paying attention at all times.

Will this system work? Undoubtedly the engineering is possible (Tesla is already doing it). The biggest question mark that remains is human nature. This system demands your attention even though you’re doing nothing. That seems unrealistic — users are bound to lapse in attention much more frequently than if they were the primary driver. The question then becomes, will people pay attention at the very rare yet very crucial moments, and can a system like this prevent more fatal accidents than it causes?

[via Engadget]

From Project To Kit: So You Want To Sell Electronic Kits

July 29, 2016 by 41 Comments

Many of us have enjoyed building electronic projects that come not from our own inspiration or ingenuity but from a ready-made kit. It makes sense, after all in buying a kit you should receive a tried-and-tested design that you can assemble without some of the heartache associated with getting a self-designed project right. And though in recent years the barriers to entry into the professional PCB market for small projects have lowered significantly, there is still an attraction to a kit that comes with a decent PCB and case.

The kit version of the Sinclair ZX81 microcomputer. By Smaddison (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
The kit version of the Sinclair ZX81 microcomputer. By Smaddison (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
If you start your electronic odyssey through kit-building, you gain more than a set of electronic projects. You learn about the circuits you build, and you gain a feel for how a well-designed project should go together. Eventually this feeds into your own projects, and in time you are producing builds that equal or surpass those you can buy as kits.

From the point of having a nicely executed project to that of wondering whether it too could be sold as a kit is not a huge step. This is the first of a series of articles that will examine the kit manufacturing process from project to customer, and will with luck deliver some insight to those of you who have always wondered whether you could make it as a kit vendor.

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When You Get Serious About Selling A Project, Consider An Accelerator

March 17, 2016 by 26 Comments

I was visiting San Francisco, scratching my head for something cool to cover for Hackaday. When it hit me: this is one of the leading cities in the world for starting new companies. It’s known for its software, but with Tesla, Type A Machines, Intel, Apple, and more within an hour’s drive of the city, there’s got to be a hardware scene as well. Silicon isn’t a software product after-all. But where do you find it, and how do you get a hardware start-up going in one of the most expensive cities in the world?

That’s where hardware accelerators or incubators, whichever name they prefer, come in. One-third hackerspace, two-thirds business crash course, they help you skip a lot of the growing pains associated with starting a capital intensive thing like a hardware business. I dropped in, and they kindly gave me a few minutes of their time. I wanted to find out what a hacker could do if they felt it was time to turn those skulls into dollars. What are the requirements. What is the cost? What help does the incubator offer to the burgeoning capitalist in a hacker?

Continue reading “When You Get Serious About Selling A Project, Consider An Accelerator” →