> As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes.
I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me.
I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is.
Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.
I'm doubtful that knowing how much politics matters, but only in a vague way, would have been enough to help them. Could someone who was obsessed with following the Trump administration's every move have predicted the tariffs in advance? I don't think financial markets priced them in?
Realistically, everyone always seems to think everything was predictable but I have maybe a handful of friends who sold the Russell 2000 futures short and then rebounded long who made millions off the various tariff trades. Ironically, Ukrainian and Russian. Ex-HFT but just doing very normal click trading. So I don't get it. Why isn't everyone who can predict the future so accurately a (deca-)millionaire?
Great read, thanks for sharing this. I'm also coming from software and have recently started making some hardware for personal use in my free time. The idea of selling it as an actual product has occurred to me, but the thought of dealing with all the logistics quickly makes me reconsider. Congrats on your launch!
Once you get your design polished, than consider partnering with a good Contract Manufacturer to do a trial run. Some will handle the ISO, CE, IC, UL and FCC paperwork for you. Make sure your Patents and Trademarks are locked down in both the manufacturing and marketed countries, or some ambitious folks will try to rip you off later. If your projected volumes attract profit sharing offers, than expect 10% to 14% of wholesale cost as a normal ask.
Tooling up a production line for even a toothbrush is well over $1.5m to get the first unit off the line. Building these factories is a different skill set, and everybody is bad it at first.
Note hardware has a 1:6 success rate compared with service companies.
Well-written and valuable for insight whether you have similar personal experience or not.
As someone who does hardware and software as well, I relate to the challenges of making something you can hold; it's very easy to underestimate the challenge difference between the two.
Your Murphy's law references are spot on; I feel comforted reading I'm not the only one this happens to! Misery does love company, and it's important to hang on that I think, so that you don't lose hope :)
Congrats on the first batch shipment! What an accomplishment. As someone who just crossed 10 years as a first time foray into HW, I'd like to tell you it gets easier. It doesn't but keep going anyway! Good luck.
When I read the "I had no prior experience in hardware; I was counting on being able to pick it up quickly with the help of a couple of mechanical/electrical/firmware engineers" I was ready to curl up into a foetal position... the fact that the author actually got something like this manufactured and shipped is nothing short of miraculous, it's not just a board off JLPCB and a plastic case, this involves custom manufacturing of metal parts and whatnot, and I take my hat off to him for managing it.
This is also why so many crowdfunded projects fail, people go into it with no idea of how hard it is to get something to market and waaaay underestimate the time and cost. Years ago for the first project we did we took an absolute worst-case estimate, then doubled the time and cost on that. We came in on time and under budget, but only just.
I'm curious, what would be the engineering challenges (either hardware or software) in making it dimmable substantially below 2500 lumens, so that it could continue to work as a primary light source when winding down after the sun goes down, rather than switching to other light sources capable of getting dimmer?
Miss posts like this on HN, thanks for the great write-up! I tried to launch a hardware thing like 10 years ago[1], but couldn't raise enough money. Fun experience nonetheless.
> It was at this point I truly began to appreciate Murphy’s law. In my case, anything not precisely specified and tested would without fail go wrong
After 20 years of system engineering, I just expected this to always be the case. Until my most recent job with a bunch of startups, where people fly by the seat of their pants, there's no communication, documentation, protection or testing, for anything. I am pissed off daily that things don't go wrong, because people now think this is normal, and it goes against everything I've learned from experience. It seems I stumbled onto the corollary of Murphy's Law: when you expect everything to go wrong, nothing does.
I definitely feel your pain. I own a company that makes custom process controls for industrial and commercial clients, and while we work from a large library of hardware and software designs from past jobs, every job has a lot of the same "start from the beginning" feel as what you went through. Especially, the one thing you didn't check is always the thing that is somehow screwed up, and the sleepless nights wondering halfway into the project if you're in deep trouble.
Hello, nice write up.
I'm curious about your deal with the factory and downstream suppliers.. did all these iterations and fixes cost more every time? Or it was a fixed contract? How does that all work
So just to confirm, the actual cause for the controls not working is still unknown to the reader but the reason the measurements didn't make sense was swapped labels?
The controls weren't working because we had wired them up according to the labels which were wrong (which is also why the measurements didn't make sense to us).
In addition to the all the other stuff, including light spectrum differences, you can't just trust that a "37000 lumen" light (cheap from China ...) is such a thing. Some examples of "100,000 lumen" flashlights that ended providing more like 2000 to 3000 lumens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_0wxzClkg
It's possible, they exist, many such LEDs are probably manufactured in China ... but the legit ones are probably more expensive, and you may need a more recognizable brand to do some QA, and keep pressure on the factory to not slip quality or inputs.
Consider the cheap screwdriver included with the lamp in this story: unexpectedly, many were more faulty than the cheapest $4 screwdriver you'd find in any hardware store. The more stories you read about manufacturing stuff in China, the more you'll see very strange things. It's not about nationality or anything, it's an extreme kind of optimization. If you didn't catch it already, maybe you didn't really need what you thought you asked for ... they're just checking/optimizing
Please don’t put in extra bright headlights on cars. Stock LED headlights being to bright for other drivers is already a massively common complaint — and then we have people installing even brighter ones? Please don’t.
It is also illegal to use non-DOT approved lighting in the US. Was behind a jackass today with a receiver mounted accessory red light that was excessively bright and made it look like the brakes were applied.
For colours to look natural you need your white light to contain lots of different wave lengths. It’s usually measured as Ra. Artificially looking LEDs are easily 10x cheaper than photography grade LEDs. Also, this guy is probably paying taxes and handling stuff the proper legal way. If you order from Alibaba, chances are you’ll not be paying taxes. Plus if they offer a 5 year warranty, they probably need to keep some money around for repairs.
Yep lumens are additive (though your eyes perceive them logarithmically).
I don't know much about car headlights, but chatgpt says high beams are typically 25-45 watts, and assuming a generous 200lm/w that gives you 5000-9000 lm.
Roughly speaking, it's expensive because it's 50 lbs & tons of electrical components (that are much higher quality than $24 headlights).
Just to add context those are just dumb lamps and I acknowledge that the product here has a lot more features including IoT support and the ability to change Hue.
Is it the ability to change Hue that makes this expensive?
Oh boy, I want one of these. This would absolutely perfect for winter depression (I suspect much better than the "SAD lamps" marketed for this purpose which are bright not even close to this bright). But £889 is a lot of money for a lamp!
If you're not afraid of DIY and it looking (much) uglier than these lamps, you can buy extremely bright "cob lights" and make something yourself: https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens
Find a garden shop, a 2' square full-spectrum light from "The Indoor Sun Shop" was very important to my mental health when I lived in Seattle and cost a lot less than this. Especially after I added a mechanical timer so I could never be too depressed to turn it on in the morning.
What a great article. It's amazing to see how many simple things can go wrong, and I'm sure there could have been more. Great work keeping your tenacity up and sticking through it.
I thought hydragyrum was a made-up word, but it's the Latin word for mercury, which explains the Hg chemical symbol. (Just in case anyone finds this interesting.)
> As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes.
I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me.
I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is.
Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.
I'm doubtful that knowing how much politics matters, but only in a vague way, would have been enough to help them. Could someone who was obsessed with following the Trump administration's every move have predicted the tariffs in advance? I don't think financial markets priced them in?
He literally said he was gonna:
"Trump vows massive new tariffs if elected, risking global economic war"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/22/trump-tra...
(https://archive.is/20231125045858/https://www.washingtonpost...)
EDIT - Found this after my post, a MUCH better "he said it":
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-president-tru...
3 replies →
Realistically, everyone always seems to think everything was predictable but I have maybe a handful of friends who sold the Russell 2000 futures short and then rebounded long who made millions off the various tariff trades. Ironically, Ukrainian and Russian. Ex-HFT but just doing very normal click trading. So I don't get it. Why isn't everyone who can predict the future so accurately a (deca-)millionaire?
This is super interesting, and I'd actually be quite interested in buying a 60K-Lumen lamp... but not at $1200.
Years ago, there was an HN article "You Need More Lumens"[1], which in turn led me down a rabbit hole.
I ended up purchasing:
The end result is somewhere around 56,000 lumens. And I LOVE it. Makes me much happier in my home office, especially in the winter months.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FKIE6M4
> Due to a miscommunication with the factory, the injection pins were moved inside the heatsink fins, causing the cylindrical extrusions below.
What happened after this? the factory have to replace the casting mold at their own expense or you have to pay for it?
What a great idea; good luck! Also, it's nice to read a hardware story on HN (we need more breaks from AI this and AI that).
Great read, thanks for sharing this. I'm also coming from software and have recently started making some hardware for personal use in my free time. The idea of selling it as an actual product has occurred to me, but the thought of dealing with all the logistics quickly makes me reconsider. Congrats on your launch!
Once you get your design polished, than consider partnering with a good Contract Manufacturer to do a trial run. Some will handle the ISO, CE, IC, UL and FCC paperwork for you. Make sure your Patents and Trademarks are locked down in both the manufacturing and marketed countries, or some ambitious folks will try to rip you off later. If your projected volumes attract profit sharing offers, than expect 10% to 14% of wholesale cost as a normal ask.
Tooling up a production line for even a toothbrush is well over $1.5m to get the first unit off the line. Building these factories is a different skill set, and everybody is bad it at first.
Note hardware has a 1:6 success rate compared with service companies.
Best of luck, =3
Well-written and valuable for insight whether you have similar personal experience or not. As someone who does hardware and software as well, I relate to the challenges of making something you can hold; it's very easy to underestimate the challenge difference between the two. Your Murphy's law references are spot on; I feel comforted reading I'm not the only one this happens to! Misery does love company, and it's important to hang on that I think, so that you don't lose hope :)
Thanks :) It turns out "hardware is hard" isn't an exaggeration!
Congrats on the first batch shipment! What an accomplishment. As someone who just crossed 10 years as a first time foray into HW, I'd like to tell you it gets easier. It doesn't but keep going anyway! Good luck.
https://blog.iotdef.com/celebrating-10-years/
When I read the "I had no prior experience in hardware; I was counting on being able to pick it up quickly with the help of a couple of mechanical/electrical/firmware engineers" I was ready to curl up into a foetal position... the fact that the author actually got something like this manufactured and shipped is nothing short of miraculous, it's not just a board off JLPCB and a plastic case, this involves custom manufacturing of metal parts and whatnot, and I take my hat off to him for managing it.
This is also why so many crowdfunded projects fail, people go into it with no idea of how hard it is to get something to market and waaaay underestimate the time and cost. Years ago for the first project we did we took an absolute worst-case estimate, then doubled the time and cost on that. We came in on time and under budget, but only just.
Looking back I agree it was miraculous lol, I don't know if I'd do it again...
I'm curious, what would be the engineering challenges (either hardware or software) in making it dimmable substantially below 2500 lumens, so that it could continue to work as a primary light source when winding down after the sun goes down, rather than switching to other light sources capable of getting dimmer?
Miss posts like this on HN, thanks for the great write-up! I tried to launch a hardware thing like 10 years ago[1], but couldn't raise enough money. Fun experience nonetheless.
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/introducing-gameref-the-anti-cheat-h...
This is a great idea. What was your biggest blocker?
Great post, I really want to see more stuff like this on HN. And congrats on shipping!
> It was at this point I truly began to appreciate Murphy’s law. In my case, anything not precisely specified and tested would without fail go wrong
After 20 years of system engineering, I just expected this to always be the case. Until my most recent job with a bunch of startups, where people fly by the seat of their pants, there's no communication, documentation, protection or testing, for anything. I am pissed off daily that things don't go wrong, because people now think this is normal, and it goes against everything I've learned from experience. It seems I stumbled onto the corollary of Murphy's Law: when you expect everything to go wrong, nothing does.
Super glad you found (and made!) a product that everyone wants. Hopefully you have brighter nights than this ..
> That was the worst period of my life; I would go to bed literally shaking with stress. In my opinion, Not Cool!
Thanks! The ups and downs of startups are very real (maybe doubly so for hardware)
Author here, happy to answer any questions about the journey!
Got a discount code for the HN family? ;-)
Congrats on shipping. I'm living in the EU working California hours (4pm-1am) and will definitely be buying one.
Just made one - use HN100: https://getbrighter.com/discount/HN100 :)
Do you have any recommendations for FCC/CE testing providers?
I definitely feel your pain. I own a company that makes custom process controls for industrial and commercial clients, and while we work from a large library of hardware and software designs from past jobs, every job has a lot of the same "start from the beginning" feel as what you went through. Especially, the one thing you didn't check is always the thing that is somehow screwed up, and the sleepless nights wondering halfway into the project if you're in deep trouble.
Hello, nice write up. I'm curious about your deal with the factory and downstream suppliers.. did all these iterations and fixes cost more every time? Or it was a fixed contract? How does that all work
Just curious about the frequency of the diodes and do they pulse simultaneously? Quite often I can perceive flicker in moving objects indoors.
We use constant current reduction dimming so there's zero flicker!
3 replies →
What was your marketing strategy once you had the $10 deposit landing page setup?
So just to confirm, the actual cause for the controls not working is still unknown to the reader but the reason the measurements didn't make sense was swapped labels?
The controls weren't working because we had wired them up according to the labels which were wrong (which is also why the measurements didn't make sense to us).
3 replies →
For someone who has no idea about light engineering or electronics if I stack two 25k Lm lamps next to each other does it make 50k Lm light?
I recently changed my car's headlamps to Chinese LED which claims to be about 37kLm and I don't know how much it is probably less than that.
Two of those lamps costee me around $24 on Amazon US (pretty sure under $10 in China).
What makes this $800+ ?
In addition to the all the other stuff, including light spectrum differences, you can't just trust that a "37000 lumen" light (cheap from China ...) is such a thing. Some examples of "100,000 lumen" flashlights that ended providing more like 2000 to 3000 lumens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_0wxzClkg
It's possible, they exist, many such LEDs are probably manufactured in China ... but the legit ones are probably more expensive, and you may need a more recognizable brand to do some QA, and keep pressure on the factory to not slip quality or inputs.
Consider the cheap screwdriver included with the lamp in this story: unexpectedly, many were more faulty than the cheapest $4 screwdriver you'd find in any hardware store. The more stories you read about manufacturing stuff in China, the more you'll see very strange things. It's not about nationality or anything, it's an extreme kind of optimization. If you didn't catch it already, maybe you didn't really need what you thought you asked for ... they're just checking/optimizing
Please don’t put in extra bright headlights on cars. Stock LED headlights being to bright for other drivers is already a massively common complaint — and then we have people installing even brighter ones? Please don’t.
It is also illegal to use non-DOT approved lighting in the US. Was behind a jackass today with a receiver mounted accessory red light that was excessively bright and made it look like the brakes were applied.
For colours to look natural you need your white light to contain lots of different wave lengths. It’s usually measured as Ra. Artificially looking LEDs are easily 10x cheaper than photography grade LEDs. Also, this guy is probably paying taxes and handling stuff the proper legal way. If you order from Alibaba, chances are you’ll not be paying taxes. Plus if they offer a 5 year warranty, they probably need to keep some money around for repairs.
> claims
That's all there is to it. Take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CJqAJ2LXw8&t=852.
Yep lumens are additive (though your eyes perceive them logarithmically).
I don't know much about car headlights, but chatgpt says high beams are typically 25-45 watts, and assuming a generous 200lm/w that gives you 5000-9000 lm.
Roughly speaking, it's expensive because it's 50 lbs & tons of electrical components (that are much higher quality than $24 headlights).
Just to add context those are just dumb lamps and I acknowledge that the product here has a lot more features including IoT support and the ability to change Hue.
Is it the ability to change Hue that makes this expensive?
The main cost driver is the sheer size/weight/power. Dimmability, adjustable CCT, and smart home controls do add a decent chunk though.
Oh boy, I want one of these. This would absolutely perfect for winter depression (I suspect much better than the "SAD lamps" marketed for this purpose which are bright not even close to this bright). But £889 is a lot of money for a lamp!
If you're not afraid of DIY and it looking (much) uglier than these lamps, you can buy extremely bright "cob lights" and make something yourself: https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens
Find a garden shop, a 2' square full-spectrum light from "The Indoor Sun Shop" was very important to my mental health when I lived in Seattle and cost a lot less than this. Especially after I added a mechanical timer so I could never be too depressed to turn it on in the morning.
Congratulations on the successful launch and excellent write-up. Hardware is fun but also much more challenging.
Great write-up! Thanks for sharing your journey
What a great article. It's amazing to see how many simple things can go wrong, and I'm sure there could have been more. Great work keeping your tenacity up and sticking through it.
Just a few slots down in my YC feed: the benefits of bright light
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00373-9
50k lm is quite high. What electric power consumption does it have ? I estimate around 500 Watt, am I right ?
580W
https://getbrighter.com/
It's 60k lumens now, and it draws 580W off the wall
Am I right in thinking you're dissipating that 580W using passive cooling only?
Impressive if so - every time I've designed something approaching that power level I've ended up needing forced air cooling.
Whats the expected life for the leds at that power draw level?
1 reply →
Good estimate, the official website for the lamp says 580W
Very interesting. I would like something like this, but not with LEDs.
Hydrargyrum medium-src iodide lamps are an alternative (artificial sun lights for movie sets), but you'll want a good AC unit in your office
I thought hydragyrum was a made-up word, but it's the Latin word for mercury, which explains the Hg chemical symbol. (Just in case anyone finds this interesting.)
Very curious why you want to avoid LEDs
No infrared spectrum
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-35389-6