[paulgerhardt]

This is so incredible.

Not every HN reader designs circuits day to day but to put this in terms of you may be able to relate to - most circuits are designed the same way within one or two standard deviations. This is like 20 standard deviations away from how it's usually done. Aside from a great use case this is some very clever lateral thinking.

Incredibly unique and special. A great hack. Blown away really.

[eb0la]

>> we ended up writing low-level embedded code, in less than 1.5KB and 135 Bytes RAM, to control the radio registers directly

This kind of code size could be common in the 80s, but today?

[neonate]

Wow, that is high praise. Can you explain in more detail what's unique and special?

[paulgerhardt]

All commercial circuit boards are designed with computer aided design tools. An unfortunate consequence of these tools are monocultural, emergent styling decisions that stem from the tooling's schema. John Maeda has half a dozen books on this - he suggests one must design ones own tools if you don't want to look like everyone else and compete with the same strengths and weaknesses as everyone else. For obvious reasons, most people don't.

The default way of designing circuits is in 2D planar view. It's uncommon to think about circuits in 3D and uncommon to think about the material science of these things.

What makes Got-It special is not just that the broke the conventions of the traditional EE design patterns but that they broke them in so many different places. Where most people would use a readily available Bluetooth Chip, it sounds like they sourced the core to half-a-chip (Bluetooth MCU chips are often a combination of Arm processor, memory, radio, power management, and communication cores - it's not common to just take a few of these things - they're sold as a package but all those parts take power and this thing has a very tight power budget). They wrote their own Bluetooth stack (this alone is a multi-year project). That stack they wrote took into account weird specification...divergences...that the Bluetooth SIG says one should do but Apple/Android don't. The circuit they designed only works with the manufacturing process they had to develop for this chip - designs are usually done on rectangular boards, not tape. Most people don't make their own passive components they source them. Most people don't think about their circuit in 4D (that is 3D+movement as it bends in use). Most people don't think about making their own manufacturing equipment to serve a SaaS like business goal. I'm not even getting into the battery part which is bananas. The list goes on, as Brian enumerated above, but the combination of so many of these things represents a radical departure from 'business as usual' and the start of a new design movement as has happened when people transitioned from using drafting tables to computers decades ago.

It's not so much that they broke walls, as they broke walls that people didn't even realize were there AND that they broke so many of them.

Again, well done!

[dilippkumar]

+1 to everything in parent comment. This is seriously insane. Esp the part about the batteries.

This is what I imagine a startup should do - develop groundbreaking core technology that nobody else would dream of doing. The actual product is just a minor side effect of all this technology.

When was the last time someone made a new product that was possible only because they developed new manufacturing technologies?

[davidlstanton]

We're flattered honestly. While some of this is stretching what we've done e.g. we didn't write a full BLE stack just the tiny amount we needed and it certainly didn't take years! Know we (and especially Brian) are humbled by your words.

To us this is what Manufacturing 4.0 is all about, simplifying a product to make something cheaper and better than standard supply chains can.

[ronyfadel]

The engineering behind this is indeed rad, but (playing devil's advocate): doesn't this go against the lean startup (also, YC) way of releasing MVPs that don't "scale"? In this case, re-engineer circuit design, write your own bluetooth stack (in part). Wouldn't they have gotten to market faster and learned faster with off the shelf parts to test their idea out?

[_xnmw]

Yeah it does seem like they put a ton of effort into this before proving demand, but fuck lean startup. This is called "building great stuff".

[mc3]

Not an expert, but this sounds like this tech needed to be developed to make the product useful for it's job. The MVP wouldn't have the "V" using off the shelf components.

[bschwindHN]

That should be telling you that "lean startup" and all those other conventions don't always apply. It is not necessary for success, and success isn't guaranteed if you _do_ follow them.