StephenSmith

We make cameras for home builders that help them manage their construction sites.

Our primary selling point is our AI detection of subcontractors - so we focus more on software than our hardware.

https://bedrockwireless.com

Subcontractors are businesses, if they're paying people to wander around on site, they have big problems.

It's more about the fact that GCs struggle to get accurate schedules around when their subs will show up, the subs are in too high of a demand (think plumbers, electricians, framers). So they ask the subs to come out and complete a job and the sub responds with, "we'll be there sometime next week." Sometimes they show up, sometimes they don't. GCs need to know when and if they are showing up.

Anything that makes the GC more efficient is going to be a win for the future homeowner. This might get more problematic for remodels, but we primarily work with new home builds.

The GC can often bill it down to the homeowner as antitheft, which reduces time/money to complete the build. The biggest being time. An example, if custom windows are stolen, it could delay a project by months right now.

You're not wrong. We have custom boards inside to handle the AI compute and power, but we mostly do assembly.

If a software startup assembles a bunch of open source hardware together and packages it as a product, would you say they don't "make" software?

We're working on this solution. Most housing projects have a semi-permanent dumpster, but GC's often have problems with people dumping in their houses' dumpsters, causing them to pay for more refills on their dumpster, which can get expensive.

Since we record motion on site, we typically catch the illegal dumpers, but it's hard to pick out from the many motion events that may occur on a construction site.

We make the whole camera system because we couldn't find anything on the market that allowed us to do the AI we wanted. The value for the customer is all in the AI tracking and security detection as well as the ability to just login live and see what's happening on site. So, yes, our core product is our software, but we had to make the hardware to capture market share.

We don't track port-o-potty use, just if they move. Vandalism is at an all time high on construction sites, tipping port-o-johns is a common teenage prank and the GC needs to know if and when this is happening on sites (and hopefully catch the perpetrators).

It's less about tracking how long they're there and more about when they showed up. We do the former because we can, but the GC really wants to know if and when their subs are showing up without having to be on site 24/7 waiting for them.

For example, they can look back through yesterdays events to see that their plumber showed up - and then they'll know they need to go check on the work. The alternative is trying to get the plumber on the phone to figure out if the work had been completed or not - which is difficult in 2023.

There's not a lot of unioned workers in most states for residential construction. But autoworkers, and anything else in manufacturing would be used to the constant monitoring. Commercial construction also typically has fulltime site superintendents, who would do this anyway.

We occasionally get the homeowner to buy our product to monitor their GC - the GC always hates this. This in-turn leads us to recommending that the GC (if they're the buyer [most common]) to never share it with the future homeowner as that usually causes the GC to be overburdened by the homeowner.

I applaud you creating your own solution, many GCs can do this, but most can't or don't want to deal with it.

I guess I would say that subcontractors are more like hourly workers (who are time tracked meticulously in almost all industries) - not salaried like software engineers, who would deserve the respect and absence of tracking.

We make a camera system for construction sites. Using computer vision, we can identify when and for how long subcontractors show up as well as notify our customers of unwanted behavior on site.

https://bedrockwireless.com/

Fun fact, we probably have the best port-o-potty detector in the world.

The long term strategies you suggest almost certainly are the long-term answer. But that's just it, those solutions may take years. San Francisco may not last that long.

From the maker of the truckla!

My school still made me take it in 2011... for a Mech-E.

Many will be surprised to hear they're based out of a small town in northern Minnesota! That Midwest/Canadian accent you get from a cheery digikey customer service rep is unmistakable! I've had wonderful luck with calling Digikey.

Could keep the units that aren't changing and only change the ones that are.

Does this mean third party apps like baconreader will break?

Very cool! Any advice for someone who would want to replicate this endeavor?

Cool, thanks for the response. Have you talked to a UI person about this? I wonder if it would be better to load it in chunks? The rolling text might be considered distracting. Though, I'm no expert.

This is fantastic. Really useful, but why do all of these AI tools have to roll out the text? Surely it's generating it fast enough that we could just be presented with the answer? I'm over this gimmick.

Elon is an investor in the company trying to kill Twitter

Having messed with 3D printers since before the iPhone came out, I can confidently say My MK3 is the best printer I've owned in terms of value. I can only imagine that they've improved upon this story with the MK4.

It clearly has four wheels. How is that still a bi-cycle?

Does anyone know how this compares to something like the NVIDIA Jetson Nano?

https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-...

Is there a version of this product that tells the site to block all cookies automatically? It seems this just answers whatever is easiest to keep the site running.

Ran them on fleet laptops. They broke. All. the. time.

Why does this not line up well with the linked data, I wonder?

Thanks! That's what I was trying to understand.

I'd love someone with more CV experience to explain why this fails on my use case?

(four image zip) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gTZWlKmS4ZtEZDK8OjjLeGN_V0F...