My opinions without any real insight into how practical/viable/useful they are:
- PCB prototyping. Board costs are way down but the 2-week turnound time kills a lot of nimbleness that could be gotten from a cheap in house rapid PCB prototyping machine. This has been tried without too much success (Othermill, LPKF, silver paint methods, etc.) imo. Isolation routing by copper ablation might even be a possibility.
- Oligonucleotide synthesis machine. This should be possible at the "hobbyist" level and would start bridging the gap to more accessible DIY bio.
- Resin 3D printing. Resin curing is one of the only methods where it's clean enough to not be hazardous, rapid and has the hope of consistent quality of 3D printing. There are some companies out there that are doing this already, of course, but I believe is still very ripe for innovation.
- DNA sequencing machines. Illumina still has a monopoly on whole genome sequencing. Even cheap genotyping at the consumer/hobbyist level would be a coup.
- Closed loop precision CNC machines. Right now most low-end hobbyist CNC machines are open loop. There's no reason, aside from NRE, that position feedback and other sensors couldn't be added to a host of CNC applications for low-cost CNC machines.
I haven't touched on some of the other electronics markets like pick and place machines that might be much more accessible with machine vision and other enabling technologies. With the DIY bio focused areas, a little infrastructure might enable other areas. For example, one step to solving the common cold might be tracking it's progress through a population, sequencing it as it crops up, seeing how it evolves and cataloging effective treatments. There's also microfluidics and "lab-on-a-chip" technology which seems like it's much more accessible now but it's not something I have a lot of familiarity with.
My opinion is that without open standards, free/libre software and free/libre hardware, all of these are almost a no-go from the start but I think that that opinion is in the minority.
- PCB prototyping. Board costs are way down but the 2-week turnound time kills a lot of nimbleness that could be gotten from a cheap in house rapid PCB prototyping machine. This has been tried without too much success (Othermill, LPKF, silver paint methods, etc.) imo. Isolation routing by copper ablation might even be a possibility.
- Oligonucleotide synthesis machine. This should be possible at the "hobbyist" level and would start bridging the gap to more accessible DIY bio.
- Resin 3D printing. Resin curing is one of the only methods where it's clean enough to not be hazardous, rapid and has the hope of consistent quality of 3D printing. There are some companies out there that are doing this already, of course, but I believe is still very ripe for innovation.
- DNA sequencing machines. Illumina still has a monopoly on whole genome sequencing. Even cheap genotyping at the consumer/hobbyist level would be a coup.
- Closed loop precision CNC machines. Right now most low-end hobbyist CNC machines are open loop. There's no reason, aside from NRE, that position feedback and other sensors couldn't be added to a host of CNC applications for low-cost CNC machines.
I haven't touched on some of the other electronics markets like pick and place machines that might be much more accessible with machine vision and other enabling technologies. With the DIY bio focused areas, a little infrastructure might enable other areas. For example, one step to solving the common cold might be tracking it's progress through a population, sequencing it as it crops up, seeing how it evolves and cataloging effective treatments. There's also microfluidics and "lab-on-a-chip" technology which seems like it's much more accessible now but it's not something I have a lot of familiarity with.
My opinion is that without open standards, free/libre software and free/libre hardware, all of these are almost a no-go from the start but I think that that opinion is in the minority.