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You could attach a pair of 180 degree camera modules to a single board computer and have a proof of concept prototype with no custom software to make it easy to use, but if you want a polished custom solution with compact hardware, battery power, and associated software you’re looking at six figures of NRE minimum. If you want a production ready product, it’s into the millions.

How cheap do you think engineers will work? Even if they could pull it off with 1000 man hours, do you really expect them to charge $1/hr? Your estimates are off by many orders of magnitude.

But what you’re describing (Minus LIDAR) is available off the shelf from multiple action camera vendors. We’ve been using 360 cameras in the action sport world for years now.

Cool thing would be attaching 180 camera to the front and 180 camera to the back of a necklace or a collar. And have some smart image processing algorithm to get 360 out of that. Paired with large storage, battery and wi-fi upload in the background this might be life-logging solution some people crave.

FITT360

> would i be able to get prototypes for say, $1000

This takes $500K+ of investment. You need expensive tooling to develop the design and license any commercial IP. You have to pay the engineers to do the design and preproduction verification work. You have to pay the fab to make the masks, make the chips, and test them. Then you have to iterate to deal with problems.

Go buy some USB hubs, some webcams, and a cheapest fake backpack...and try out Ricoh Theta first if you're going to burn that $1000 anyway.

What do the current crop of 360-degree view cameras lack that you really want?

https://www.techradar.com/news/best-360-degree-camera

You could take the raw video from these and run it through a SLAM algorithm (simultaneous location and mapping) to build a 3-D map of the environment.

Those cameras may not be as small as what you envision, but you'll have trouble making them even smaller.

If you want to carry around a lidar unit, I have some bad news for you regarding cost and weight...

Thank you for this.

Like i said, i wanted one of these years ago and these things didnt exist then....

But i think ill buy one now

> If i have a product definition, would i be able to get prototypes for say, $1000 assuming its a fairly (seemingly) simple product?

No.

Simplest microcontroller prototypes start to fly from $6k-$10k if you want anything beyond a kickstarter project.

I once worked in an LED lighting company, a simplest analog IC went into $3m after cost overruns from $1.2m after a few failed tapeouts.

To make any IC under $1m requires you to really know what you are doing. It's not what a startup with green, unexperienced engineers can do.

Or you could go with an FPGA for low volumes. Like the Lattice CrossLink-NX. It can get video input and even aggregate multiple video feeds into one as output for further processing.

And you can do an FPGA to ASIC conversion which is probably the cheapest “custom” ASIC option out there.

Don’t you need to have a minimum (substantial) amount to be made before a fab will do anything for you?

There are companies that specialize in FPGA to ASIC conversion, and I think it works by sharing masks with other custom ASIC orders. So I think it’s feasible at thousands of units. It’s something like 50% lower power and cost per unit than FPGA and a little higher speed as well. Not super dramatic, but is a pretty easy path. I think $10,000 to $35,000 non-recurring costs plus the cost of the chips themselves. Potentially in the Kickstarter range.

Full custom ASICs get much higher performance, lower power, lower per unit cost but have like a minimum of $500,000 NRE costs.

I did a business plan for this and tried to raise money almost 20 years ago. :)

We are building such products, exactly.

Http://www.mosaic51.com

You've got no idea what simple or complex means.

If you had asked for a 3 or 4 cameras with 5mm lenses on 25x25mm base boards connected by MIPI ribbon cables under your collar to a few Raspberry Pis and a big battery in a backpack, you can do that today with off-the-shelf hardware for half your budget. They won't be synchronized, you can do that after the fact in your video editor. Getting someone to hold your hand and configure it for you will still cost the rest of your budget, but it's job done.

Or buy an off-the-shelf 360 degree action camera with included mounting pole and just use that.

Miniaturizing it into an ASIC and custom optics? That's man-years of effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And both DARPA and the private sector have put millions to billions into miniaturizing and reducing power requirements for LIDAR into the baseball cap and it's still humanly impossible at the moment to fit it into the button of a baseball cap.

It's not even necessary to ask whether the pandemic makes these tasks a few percent cheaper. If you have an idea, get some basic information about the problem domain first.

Please don't be a jerk in HN comments. If you know more than others, it's great to provide correct information, but please don't put other people down.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I typically agree with your calls on being a jerk vs. not, but LeifCarrotson is being pretty factual here.

Hardware is incredibly expensive and time consuming to create from scratch in ways programmers usually don't appreciate. If the GP is asking those questions after thinking about the problem for years they do clearly need to be told they have no idea what the problem is.

In the hardware business we are constantly approached by people who have little more than a vague idea and a hobby-money budget. I've seen what happens when you encourage them, and it usually involves fucking up their retirement if you let them get too far.

Much more humane to see it for what it is and shoot the idea down as fast as possible, or at least help them understand they probably need VC level funding to get anywhere.

If someone has been simmering on an idea for years and can't even formulate a clear explanation of a problem he wants to solve (so that people can explain what's required past "it's really expensive, don't do it") it's clearly not sinking in and there's no product there, just a guy who wants to play with technology and waste manufacturer's time while doing it.

I certainly wouldn't argue against any of that. But it's easy to make such a case without putting someone else down. In fairness, though, the bits I was objecting to in LeifCarrotson's comment were pretty borderline.

There's a long long tail of weirdness and variation in any large population (such as an internet forum like HN), so it's best to give people the benefit of the doubt. It can easily seem like someone else is doing one thing when in reality they're doing another. I feel like half of the moderation we have to do in comments boils down to this.

Not disagreeing, just adding more info:

I think a lot of people on the manufacturing side react in a confrontational way because it's disrespectful to a manufacturer when someone wants to use the infrastructure they've sunk years into as a playground with no hope of actually making it to production.

If a manufacturer takes on 10 projects in a year and none of them do anything but endless prototyping they will quickly go out of business. Unlike in software where you make your money in the design phase.

If someone has been trying to make a hardware project happen for years and they still don't understand this dynamic then there's not just an understanding issue, there's a track history of being a drain on other people's resources, or at least a willingness to be one. Establishing a relationship with everyone needed to make hardware has a much higher drain on partner resources than would happen if a consumer called a help line or a programmer read some API documents. Just making a quotation can take a week or more for a non-trivial hardware project, and prototyping is generally not that profitable either, if at all.

An analogy: If someone came in here and said they wanted to hire CS grad students to work on Blockchain (but no clear idea of a specific problem) during the shutdown and was hoping they could pay them half of what they make on their already lower than market rate research stipend but still take advantage of the research topics they are involved in, I think expressing a certain amount of "hey, those are real people you are hoping to screw over" would be appropriate.

> humanly impossible at the moment to fit it into the button of a baseball cap It’s actually pretty close, considering the size of this LiDAR module: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=93&v=xz6CExnGw9w