looking for business / product ideas - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / projects

author: Spikee
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 12, 2018, 12:53:31 pm
content: Together with a friend I'm looking for new opportunities. He is really good on the firmware and backend side of things and I'm mainly focused on design, manufacturing, sourcing etc.We have been doing consulting together for multiple years and are looking for new opportunities.This is just a general question of do you have any business ideas or product ideas in mind that have the potential to be reasonably successful?Some of the projects we have played with before / that we came up with:1. Precision current analyzer:This is a piece of portable test equipment that is able to accurately measure the current profile of a product. This is something we needed when we were doing some consulting on ultra low power products but the equipment for that is really expensive. We made a few prototypes of this.General specs:24bit ti ADS1256 adc, isolated usb power, isolated USB signal, precision voltage reference, dual isolated "trigger" inputs, cortex m3 micro with USB, temp and humidity sensor.Has two on board sense resistors (0.1R, 2R, or external shunt) and can bidirectionally do current measurement, and has a separate voltage measurement (so you can calculate the wattage).Some pictures:GUI(actual working proto; low sample rate at high resolution; QT based):While the MVP is actually working it needs a bit more software work. The problem that we have is it is hard to determine which specs you are going for.And when is it good enough. Also since this is quite an specialized product the market might be limited so you might have to charge a lot of money.2. Another product we have been thinking of is something for agriculture. Previously we did something for monitoring straw bales in Australia.These things tend to catch fire if you leave them un-attended and un-monitored. Although the product was quite basic at the time we haveall the capabilities to make this much smarter, lora connected, fairly low cost, with a nice web backend / interface.The problem we see with this is the potential small market here in The Netherlands which makes the product expensive.3. Some kind of equipment for the Camper / RV space4. other various distributed (lora?) connected monitoring systems be it agriculture or others.5. Some kind of NL based prototyping shop; Low cost laser cutting, low cost waterjet cutting (all trough a online calculator and ordering system)6. I have done small batch pnp assembly for clients in house before and that was actually quite profitable. There would be potentially an option todo some kind of macrofab kind of thing here in NL. Fully online calculated price (but mainly aimed at the "simpler" products). This might work together with idea 5.7. Bus pirate idea but just make it better. Something that would be an addition to a Saleae logic in developing and interfacing with new I2C / SPI based sensors.Make proper software for it and sell the product trough kickstarter or distributors.8. Imdes vapor phase reflow oven but better constructed with proper software / firmware at a reasonable price-point. But the market for this might be a bit small.Any ideas or feedback is greatly appreciated.Note: my profile shows a Chinese flag but I'm actually based back in my homecountry The Netherlands again after having worked in Shenzhen China for about two years.