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0 pointsatroyn10y ago0 comments

Oh hey Diego, didn't recognise your username! Great to see you applying to the fellowship, you definitely have the right 'hacker' mentality. (Just for the rest of HN's reference, Diego built a rig where you could watch yourself walk around in 3rd person like in a video game, using an Oculus rift and a camera drone).

Back to feedback:

- Linemetrics has been doing this sort of thing for industry for a little while, though more around energy usage. https://www.linemetrics.com/de/ If you already have a paying / letter of intent client for your system, you should have that front and center in your application.

- Where does the AI part come in? Those seem like fairly straightforward monitoring applications. What you wrote suggests that you would be able to tell customers what they should do about the anomalies/waste you detect, how do you plan to do that?

- Which of the industries you mentioned do you want to go after first?

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daraosn10y ago· 2 in thread

Thanks for the props Anton!

- Yes, there are many actors in the market of smart building, we are currently talking with another one, cannot disclosure though.

- We want to have AI in the DNA of our platform, the first stage is collection of data, we can already do that with our platform, now we will focus in developing the first approach of pattern recognition for the data we receive from sensors, so we can identify clusters, then ask the users to tag data to train our classifier, and build from there our machine learning component.

- At the moment, we are focused on the platform. We are staying wide and open to developers and enthusiasts (horizontal approach), we want to be flexible, use open source technologies (currently supporting Arduino and ESP8266, and common sensors and actuators), we will explore some verticals on the way, we hope this approach will help us make the platform bigger.

atroynOP10y ago

Why would your potential customers choose your platform over others before you have the fancy A.I DNA?

daraosn10y ago

We are making a huge effort in keeping things very simple, we want to lower the barriers to entry by offering affordable hardware in two aspects: price and ease to implement-use (plug n play).

All this started over a year ago, we worked on some IoT projects, we realized we needed a platform to make it real, but none of the existing were simple and flexible enough for our needs.

The one project that kickstarted Undercontrol.io was monitoring the temperature of the fish tank we have at home, after some fish died due to an issue with the heater we started monitoring the temperature and receiving alerts when something went wrong. Sure, you can buy fancy sensors, but they are expensive, we already had all the components and the technology from other applications at home. We believe IoT should be accessible for everyone, you have the example of Arduino, Raspberry Pi, NodeMCU and so many others. All of those are very useful developing tools, but we were missing a powerful workshop for creating real applications with all these tools.

From here we want to unleash the potential we believe our idea has, but baby steps first. :-)

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