Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of clever product hacks by customers? - danielhughes
======
ollieglass
The Dexcom G4 is a continuous glucose monitoring system (CGMS) worn by type 1
diabetics. It has a USB port and Windows only software for downloading and
analysing data.

A team of developers / users have created an open source realtime remote
monitoring, alarm and glucose prediction system for it. It uses a USB OTG
cable to connect the Dexcom to a commodity Android phone, which runs a custom
Android app to upload the data to MongoLab. From there, a Node.js powered
dashboard gives viewers - typically parents of diabetic children - a way to
monitor glucose levels remotely. In addition, a Pebble watch app lets the
wearer check their glucose by just looking at their wrist, instead of having
to use the bulky Dexcom monitor.

[http://nightscout.github.io/posts/01-quickstart/](http://nightscout.github.io/posts/01-quickstart/)

~~~
cperciva
Impressive! And something I could see myself doing at some point, too...

Any idea if anything like this is possible for a Medtronic CGM? Their latest
model has very good pump integration but I want real-time electronic data too.

~~~
ollieglass
Medtronic pump and CGM integration is work in progress - any help would be
really valuable to the project.

Ben West is reverse engineering the Medtronic protocol, this code can download
pump settings and historic data [https://github.com/bewest/decoding-
carelink/tree/cgm/touch-u...](https://github.com/bewest/decoding-
carelink/tree/cgm/touch-ups)

~~~
cperciva
Awesome. I don't have one of these yet, but I'll certainly check this out when
I do. The most important thing is to know that the hardware support is there
-- to paraphrase xkcd, the rest is software and I'm sure it will happen
eventually.

------
patio11
I had a teacher make seating charts in Bingo Card Creator by exploiting the
fact that, for the free trial, the random perturbation of the words is
deterministic. She put 1 through 25 in the word list, observed where they
showed up on the bingo card, then replaced them with students' names to get
the desired seating chart. (How do I know this? Because she bought BCC and
that replaced the deterministic random seed with an actual random seed,
causing the seating chart to break and her to send me a support email the next
time she tried printing it.)

Given that one of my Internet buddies runs a table planning software company I
probably should have bought her a license on general principles.

~~~
transfire
Instead of calling students by name, she can just call them by their bingo
numbers. B12 and N32 could you please come to the board. :-)

~~~
jheriko
as a tangent... one of my former teachers would call register by assigning us
numbers at the start of the year, then everyone would say them in sequence. a
lot faster than the classical approach. :)

------
jschwartzi
When I did phone support for a barcode scanning company I had one customer
trying to use an undecoded scan engine to guide robots across a floor.

A scan engine works by sweeping a laser across the barcode and using the light
intensity at different points to determine where the bars and spaces are
relative to each other. A modern scan engine will usually output what data was
in the barcode, but an undecoded scan engine outputs a continuous stream of
data indicating the light intensity received from the laser.

If I recall correctly, they had a bunch of timing marks on the floor that the
robot would follow, and they were scanning these using the engine. You could
keep a robot on-track in this way because, if the laser is angled relative to
the timing marks a large part of the sweep isn't going to contain any marks
and so the robot needs to correct. Then it's just a matter of servo'ing down
the line.

I would never have thought to do something like that so it was probably the
best call I'd gotten all year.

------
encoderer
Shortly after launching Cronitor.io, (a dead-simple SaaS solution for
monitoring cron jobs), we noticed a large number of tracking events coming
from a specific user -- 3000x more than we normally see after a user starts
monitoring a job.

The normal use case is to curl your tracking URL at the end of your crontab
line, so seeing 25k events coming in over 48 hours clued us in that Cronitor
was being used for something different than we expected.

Turns out, the user needed to do a big one-time batch processing of thousands
of records and wanted to keep track of how many were done, and wanted to be
alerted when the process was complete. By curling his tracking URL at the end
of his event loop, he could leave behind his workstation and trust that he
would be notified when the batch was done.

(If you want to know a little more about Cronitor, check out an awesome blog
post from my co-founder, The First Paying Customer
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020980))

~~~
abcd_f
Please try and contain yourself. I know you want to take every opportunity to
promote your project, but comments like this one come across as blatantly
spammy.

~~~
alex_doom
That's pretty much the point of this thread...

------
BraveNewCurency
As William Gibson put it: "The street finds it's own uses for things."

Back before cell phones, Motorola sold a lot of walkie-talkie type radios.
Most of these were 'ruggedized' (encased in big thick yellow/orange rubber
padded boot). One day, Motorola engineers came up with a 'better' padded boot
they thought would help the radios survive a fall.

But they got complaints from the Air Force. So they investigated..

It turns out that the Air Force mechanics need to 'chalk' their airplanes to
track state (bombs loaded, fuel loaded, etc). But the mechanics were always
loosing their chalk. So they would just 'scrape' the plane with the (padded)
back of their radios, and it would leave a (non-permanent) mark like chalk.
The 'improved' padding didn't work the same way, so they asked Motorola to
keep selling the old padding (and they did).

(Heard this a long time ago. Really fuzzy on all the details, but I'm sure
it's true.)

------
hluska
I sold surveillance cameras when I was in University and had a customer build
something similar to a GoPro using a bullet camera, a portable mini-dvr and
battery packs. I don't recall the quality being very good, but he was an
interesting guy!

~~~
jgiger2014
How viable is it to offer a surveillance camera installation service while in
college? I'm sure there are people who own an expensive house and don't know
how to setup an advanced DVR such as ZoneMinder.

~~~
hluska
That was my theory - people don't feel secure, surveillance equipment can be
complicated and so people would gladly pay for someone to come in and set
everything up for them. It worked out fairly well for me, but I feel that it
only worked well for me because I got lucky and had some good strategic
options:

a) Someone I knew opened up a store that sold surveillance equipment. I
aligned myself with his store, trained his staff and booked my appointments
out of it.

b) After a few months, I started to focus on small business instead of
residential installs.

c) I have a combination of strong technical and writing skills. Whenever I
finished an install, I would give the client a customized report where I
explained what I did, documented what types of cameras we installed,
documented the lines of sight that we covered, went step by step through
everything she would need to do, and gave my contact information. Those
reports became biz dev.

Having a location was especially valuable to me because the surveillance
industry is all about trust. Without a storefront, I would have been some guy
in his late 20s who worked out of his apartment and knew quite a lot about
breaking into places.

I moved into the small business market because there were unexpected quirks
with the residential market. To put it gently, there are really three kinds of
people who need surveillance cameras. The majority (I hope) own a home and are
scared of being taken advantage of. They may own some collectible cars, or
they may have a valuable baseball card collection and they want some
additional security. Some people have in-home child care and want to be able
to check up on the child care provider. Those people are excellent. Another
group of possible clients are drug dealers/miscellaneous criminals who have
property they want to protect. And, a third group lives in a different reality
than I do.

One particular customer wanted to hire me to install hidden cameras in his ex-
wife's house. He thought that she was cheating on him and wanted to catch her
in the act. And yes, this was his ex-wife. Or, another fellow wanted cameras
because he was convinced that the RCMP broke into his house at night and
injected him with mind control drugs to keep him addicted to drugs. And
several men came in wanting hidden cameras installed in their bedrooms,
pointed at their beds. There must have been a rash of pillow thefts going on
or something....?? ;)

Long story short, sometimes the residential side just felt really dodgy and I
was always very concerned that people were lying to me. And, since the kinds
of people who need security are often paranoid (they have a reason), it was
very hard to read residential customers. Consequently, I left a massive amount
of money on the table. But, it didn't seem worth the risk to me because the
storefront and the fact that I had an inventory of security cameras to work
with gave me access to the small business market.

Small business is all the fun of residential with some added bonuses.

a) Small business setups are significantly easier to plan than in-house
setups. For example, how would you set up hidden cameras in a two storey, 1950
square foot house when a client is concerned that her babysitter is abusing
her children? Do you put hidden cameras in every room? If so, do you use all
wireless and risk getting into interference/interception problems? Does the
customer have the budget for a 16 channel DVR? On and on...

b) Small business owners are significantly easier to deal with. For the most
part, they're either pissed off with shoplifters or they're scared one of
their employees is stealing from them. This is easier to work through than
someone who is concerned about gangsters breaking into his grow op.

c) Small business owners tend to know other small business owners, so if you
can get six setups on your own, those six people will help you line up your
next projects.

The biggest downside to small business is that if you don't have a storefront
to work out of, they can be a very hard group of people to market to.

Long story short, I had some success, but I feel like my particular
circumstances had more to do with the success than any particular strength of
the market. This is a strong market, but it's a strong market with some
problems that can make it somewhere between dangerous and stressful to serve.

~~~
jgiger2014
Thanks for the in-depth answer, I appreciate it. While this is exactly what I
am looking for, I want to know what is the minimum amount of equipment needed
to get any jobs. For example the most important are the cameras, but to mount
them you would need a ladder. To be able to bring a ladder to sites you need a
long van. Then you need experience as an electrician if the house in question
does not have the Ethernet cables installed. All these expenses add up to 100k
plus 100k for a storefront at a minimum, correct?

~~~
fencepost
The ladder isn't really that big an issue, you can get a decent collapsible or
telescoping ladder that will travel pretty easily in a hatchback, small wagon
or minivan. Something that will work in most offices with 8-10' suspended
ceilings will probably set you back ~$100, for higher ceilings you're going to
pay more and probably need a minivan, as well as some muscles to wrangle it
around (e.g. Werner MT-26 or Little Giant 12026 which collapsed are ~6ft and
$300-500). Having 2 ladders will often make a _huge_ difference in your
productivity.

You don't really need that much electrical experience for running low-voltage
Ethernet, but you will need some and you need common sense, some basic
construction skills, more common sense, some planning skills, and a bit more
common sense. Keep in mind that you're going to be putting holes in walls,
putting up new faceplates, etc. and you don't want to put them in crooked or
leave a mess. Keep in mind that it's one thing for your friends to wonder
"What was he thinking?" and a completely different thing for your customers /
referral sources to wonder the same.

You'll need a vehicle, but it probably doesn't need to be new. Ladders, call
it $1k. Cable fishing equipment, drills, saws, etc. maybe another $1k.
Consumable supplies (boxes of cable, jacks, patch cables, wall plates, low-
voltage mounting brackets, patch panels, etc.) will easily take another few
thousand (particularly using plenum cable). You'll want to keep some quantity
of equipment (cameras, etc.) on hand to do immediate fixes/replacements for
your customers unless you have a good local supplier, but you may be able to
avoid keeping a large stock as long as your orders have enough lead time (and
you have the ability to purchase as needed). Insurance, licensing, etc. will
chew some, but even so I'd say you're still looking at well under $100k to
start, and certainly not $200k unless you're in a very expensive market.

With questions like those, though, I'd recommend spending at least some time
working for someone already in the business.

------
pdkl95
While any specific use isn't very interesting, an honorable mention should go
to the army's P-38 can opener. It was the minimum amount of sheet metal
wrapped around just barely enough of a cutting surface to open a can of C
rations.

As they were cheap and easily available due to being standard in a pack of
rations, they ended up being used for... everything. The link below mentions a
few of the simple can opener ended up being used, if you want a few examples
and has a picture of the tool.

[http://olive-drab.com/od_rations_p38.php](http://olive-
drab.com/od_rations_p38.php)

------
aik
I write software used by organizations that help individuals with
developmental disabilities. Sometimes the organizations have to babysit the
individuals (day programs), or have them help with work, while their guardians
are out working during the day.

I recently got a call from a staff at an org that was having an individual
help with her workload by using our software - she was honestly complaining
that an update we had pushed out had made things so much more efficient, so
that the individual they were babysitting/keeping busy/working finished their
work so much faster that they didn't know what else to do with her. She wanted
us to revert our update back to a state of being less efficient. (Of course we
responded that we can't support that type of organizational workflow...)

We had no idea our system was used as a tool for keeping people busy for the
sake of being busy and not causing trouble!

~~~
steanne
also, that individual (or his/her guardian) was paying for the privilege of
doing her work for her.

------
niccl
A company I occasionally do support for has a profitable legacy system that
runs on 486 or lower PCs. Supplier of product out of busiess. One PC died and
they couldn't get any more. I found a manufacturer of current PC104 boards
with a 486 CPU. moved the software across to those. It nearly worked but would
occasionally crash. I asked a genius friend to have a look at it. He got out
his trusty DOS debug floppy disks, footled around for a few days working out
what was wrong (slightly incompatible implementation of serial port in the SoC
on the PC104 boards, plus crap code in the original system), hand-assembled a
workaround and wrote it in to blank space on the original executable, and
presto! the system has been running reliably on the new hardware for a couple
of years now.

------
andrewdubinsky
It's not software, but it's really awesome.

[http://www.ikeahackers.net/](http://www.ikeahackers.net/)

Hacking cheap furniture. Ikea actually gave them some grief for a time, but I
think they backed off.

~~~
mikehotel
I think the site is great!

I also thought the site was going away courtesy IKEA legal, but apparently
based on user feedback, IKEA is reconsidering. The original legal action was
voted up here on HN last month but the follow up not so much.

See: [http://www.ikeahackers.net/2014/06/inter-ikea-systems-bv-
cal...](http://www.ikeahackers.net/2014/06/inter-ikea-systems-bv-called-
me.html)

~~~
thekevan
I thought Ikea specifically didn't want to stop the site from posting useful
and interesting ways to use their furniture, they were just required to
protect the use of their trademark in the name of said site.

~~~
jonsen
On the front page:

"This site will be moving to a new domain. Enter your details to be informed
of our big move."

------
JacobAldridge
"Show HN" was organic, now 'official', and one of this site's best features.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show)

------
garrido
'@' mentions and the retweet.

~~~
fernandotakai
hashtags too.

------
vishalchandra
A friend's family owns a plastic manufacturing facility. They buy a lot of
Coca Cola, for cleaning their manufacturing equipment (of grease, oil etc)
after each production round. Much cheaper than the industrial cleaning agents.

------
JacobAldridge
I definitely recommend exploring the Sugru site
([http://sugru.com/](http://sugru.com/)) - it's a product basically made for
clever product hacks by customers.

