I have a congenital eye condition called keratoconus. It makes using optics very awkward. I don't see a dot; I just see a smear.
So I'm wondering if there are other people out there with keratoconus who have dealt with this? What did you do?
TIA
Hi,
I just wound down a product I spent two years building, and I'd like a sanity check from people who've been here.
The product: Mother Hen, a monitor for backyard chicken coops. It was a cell-attached system for chicken coops that geographically could be anywhere. It monitors the status of chicken doors and any other kind of door in the chicken coop. If a door is open or closed at an inappropriate time, you are notified via SMS plus an appliance that sits in your house, plus notifications on a web app.
The tech worked — custom ESP32 firmware, AWS backend, web portal, two beta sites running reliably for months, patents filed. This was not a case of the product failing.
What failed was demand. I ran three separate tests:
The tell that finally convinced me: when I announced I was shutting it down, nobody fought it. Not the beta users, not the enthusiasts. Everyone politely said "okay." In two years, nobody ever said "take my money."
My own post-mortem says the root cause was that I built it for one friend who loved it, and extrapolated from n=1 to a market. The friend proved the problem exists; he never proved it generalizes. And he was a biased sample — loyal to me, and an outlier among coop owners.
So my question for this group: is there anything I could have done that I didn't? Was there a test, a pivot, or a signal I should have caught earlier — or is "build it and confirm nobody buys" sometimes just the tuition?
Someone close to me keeps chickens and had a scare recently — their kid went out to collect eggs and left the nest box door open. Nobody noticed until after dark. The automatic pop door had closed right on schedule, but the flock was exposed all evening through a door nobody thought about.
Got me wondering how the rest of you handle this. The automatic door seems like the easy part — it's all the other doors (nest box, run gate, the people door) that look like the real risk, especially when kids or anyone else is helping out and might forget one.
So for those of you who've been at this a while: how do you actually make sure everything's shut before dark? Do you just walk out and eyeball every door every night, or do you have some kind of system or routine that catches it?
-T
Predators are my biggest worry with chickens, and it bugs me that a lot of us already have Ring/Nest cameras on the property that just sit there recording — they don't actually *tell* you when something's stalking the run or when the coop door didn't shut at dusk.
Has anyone rigged their cameras to do something useful here? And if a setup existed that watched the coop for predators and flagged you in real time, is that something you'd actually want — or is it a solved problem and I'm overthinking it?
Hi all. I'm a retired software engineer from Silicon Valley, and in retirement I like building small, practical gadgets to help people out.
Talking with a cattleman recently, he mentioned that the existing ways to monitor your water reserves are mostly industrial systems built for huge operations — thousands of dollars. I got curious whether there's a much cheaper way to do the basic job: keep an eye on a trough's depth, or how much is left in a big barrel/tank, so you know your cattle are watered without walking out to check.
I'm not selling anything and not asking for a dime — just trying to figure out if this is a real itch before I spend time on it. Two questions:
Brutally honest answers welcome, including "don't bother, this already exists." Thanks.
Hi everyone,
Let me say this right up front: I'm not selling anything, and this may never become a product. I'm a retired engineer, and in retirement I've taken to finding little projects that might help people. Some of them turn into something, most of them don't — it's basically my hobby. So this is a genuine question, not a pitch.
Here's what I do: I build systems for remote sensing and notification — devices that keep an eye on something and let you know what's going on without you having to be there.
I've been told that one of the things beekeepers really want to know is the temperature and humidity inside their hives. That happens to be something I know how to build: a system that could monitor any number of hives and send you an update every couple of hours on the temperature and humidity in each one.
Before I sink any time into it, though, I wanted to ask the people who'd actually use such a thing — would this be useful to you? I'll be upfront: I honestly don't know the first thing about bees. To me it's an interesting technical problem, so I figured I'd come ask the experts whether there'd be any real demand for it.
If this makes sense and you've got thoughts, I'd love to hear them. And if it's a solution in search of a problem, tell me that too — I can take it.
Thanks for reading!