[seveibar]

Hardware is becoming more accessible, so more software companies are going to release hardware products or build hardware products for internal purposes. The future of physical world innovation isn't going to come from legacy hardware corpos, but from software companies that run hardware experiments that become real hardware products. Hats off to Posthog for making it cool!

The reason hardware has sucked in the past is poor tooling. But now open-source solutions are getting pretty good, and AI is covering many knowledge gaps.

[fidotron]

This is the truth - my recent work has dragged me into doing exactly this, building hardware "giveaways" to promote SaaS in niche industries, and enabling the backend devs to have an API they can understand to control it.

It has made me wonder why such things haven't been more popular attached to Grafana. For example, take a LED strip and use that as a gauge or similar. Many devs seem to fetishize screens and enjoy extra displays in their environments, while normies (at least the feedback from the recent work) have been telling me they actively want to get away from any screens. OTOH using LED strips rapidly turns anywhere into a vape shop.

[joshvm]

These do exist but they're remarkably expensive and the infrastructure is apparently terrible. Several companies sell "smart led displays" that people use to show their follower counts while streaming. There's no reason you couldn't make one and have it subscribe to ntfy or something like that. But adoption seems ropey because the use cases are always clocks and $200 for a screen is a big ask for most people.

See the "tidybyt" https://www.theverge.com/23303371/tidbyt-review-desk-accesso...

There are anecdotes about offices having a "build status" LED and you would get shamed if your commit broke the CI.

[alisonatwork]

I think it's the same reason why phones killed cameras and portable music players. It's neat to have dedicated devices that do one thing well. It's even neater to have one device that can do all the things. It's easier to transport, easier to store, easier to clean and so on. From a sustainability perspective it's probably also generating less waste, although I don't have enough knowledge in materials science to confirm that notion.

I sometimes wonder if this impulse is part of the appeal of LLMs for the people who use them for everything - not that they're actually better at anything, but just that they're kinda good enough at all of the things to make it easier to consult them than to consult dedicated sources of information.

[Saigonautica]

I agree wholeheartedly!

I like to use the TM1640 and RGB LEDs. It's cheap, works well, requires a minimum of external components, and can convey a fair amount of information. It can also drive a 16x8 LED matrix if I do want something screen-like.

Usually I'll control it with a Wi-Fi MCU like the ESP8266 or Pi Pico W. Total component cost, including board, sits around 5$ each with a minimum quantity of 5.

[oersted]

Could you elaborate on these hardware projects? They sound cool.

If your workflow lets you crank out hardware quickly and cheaply enough for just a marketing stunt, you must be using methodologies we could learn from.

I’m not convinced developers just like normal screens though, tactile/analogue widgets are always cool and welcome!

[thepryz]

When someone mentions smart devices without screens, I’m always reminded of David Rose’s work on what he called “Enchanted Objects”. If you look on YouTube, you should be able to find some talks he did at TED and Google highlighting his work.

[andylynch]

I’d love to set up stuff like this, but our IT security guys would really not like the risk with everything else on their plate!

[belmarca]

This really echos our own experience at BLINX [1].

Pr. Marc Feeley's lab develops codeBoot [2], an online IDE to teach students programming (and more!). We created BLINX as a hardware platform for students to go along with our IDE. The device acts as a data collector for various Grove sensors and publishes the data as an HTTP endpoint. You can program it directly from codeBoot.

BTW if anybody has any questions feel free to reach out!

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blinxinc (working on a landing page)

[2]: https://codeboot.org (also working on a landing page)

[micromacrofoot]

the options for hobby electronics these days are incredible, you can get a microcontroller for under 20 bucks and attach it to almost any sensor, light, or display you can imagine — add a little beginner python and it's connected to your smart home