Adarsh Malpeddiwar

How do you explain physical AI to a 6-year-old? Start with things they use every day. Atoms → AI takes kids from a fan, a stove or a bike, down to the atoms and up to robots, in simple visual steps. From physical to physical AI: atoms-to-ai.vercel.app

You never know you may turn your hardware project into the product you’ve always dreamed of seeing people use. 6 days. 6 builders. 1 goal. Hyderabad.

3 km morning run on the serene roads of IISc with @underdogbuilder. A beautiful way to start the day.

Partners. Laksh x @underdogbuilder.

The team.

Met @subhashchy, our own Tony Stark in his Lab and got a glimpse of his Robot.

Happy to share that Team Laksh (Laksh x @underdogbuilder x Aryash x Ankit) won 2nd place at the Pet Creature Commons Hardware Hackathon by @therohaan and @knowShubhangi. They built a smart ball that keeps dogs engaged and calm by responding to their play with soothing piano music. At the same time, it tracks the dog’s physical activity, giving the owner useful insights too. Built using a Glyph ESP32-C6 and MPU6050, with the entire device capsuled inside a 3d-printed case, embedded inside the cage ball. Happy dog. Happy owner.

Wonderful meeting @_streetdogg in person. Laksh and he had long conversations about firmware, regenerative braking, capacitors and more. And very grateful to @underdogbuilder for spending his time with us.

A pleasure meeting @kmr_dilip in person. Fitness personified. He and Laksh had some interesting conversations and plenty to exchange.

24 hours. From an idea to a fully deployed, multi-user platform. Barely 3 hours of sleep. At Midnight Moonshots by @spacetimedb, Laksh and @underdogbuilder chose a boring problem they had personally felt over a shiny hackathon build. And then shipped an extraordinary amount in one day. Domain + DNS live. Auth working. Email working. QR onboarding. Builder profiles and submissions. Multiple people joining and using it simultaneously. Real-time updates across users. Support workflows. Everything deployed, tested and working. Not slides. Not mockups. Not “we’ll build this later.” Working software, on the internet, being used by real people. In 24 hours. And the best part was what happened alongside the build. People from across the world started discovering it, offering help, ideas and support. They chose usefulness over spectacle because they had felt the problem themselves. Thoughtful problem. Relentless 24 hours. Real product. Real people. @aachmannnn @Bhoomiarora_

At the Midnight Moonshot: The team has finalised a problem. One that both of them have lived through, and something hardware builders like @pramodk73, @PrathamJainAI, @buildwithsrini and @kabilankb2003 can probably vouch for. In India, if you are a hardware builder with a working prototype, there is no easy way to raise small, informal funding to build and test the next pilot. And there is no simple way for people who genuinely want to support such builders to put in a small amount as a goodwill gesture. That gap is what the team wants to solve. @Bhoomiarora_ @aachmannnn

There is a strange gap in hardware building. You can build a working prototype. But then you need ₹10,000 or ₹20,000 to make 10 of them, put them in real hands and find out if the idea actually works. Too small for an investor. Too early for customers. Too awkward to keep asking friends. And many good hardware projects probably die right there.

Team at work.

Take @underdogbuilder, a hardware builder. He has built Bunty, a desktop AI assistant. The prototype is ready and working. Now comes the difficult part: taking it to a real pilot. A pilot can’t be a bunch of handmade DIY prototypes. He needs proper PCBs, enclosures, components, assembly and enough units to put Bunty on real people’s desks and learn from them. He doesn’t need crores. He needs enough money to cross that small but critical gap between: “I built it.” and “People are actually using it.” How does an independent hardware builder in India fund that gap today? Can the team address this gap at the Midnight Moonshots? @Bhoomiarora_ @paulfinneyx

Locked in.