Witness all of the people who, when you suggest that there is demand for open hardware products, show up to tell you that ordinary people don't care about that so STFU nerd. As if they're afraid someone would actually offer it.

The problem, of course, is that ordinary people don't care at first, because at first the collar is only installed around your neck and not yet used to shock you, and people with no eye for the future say, what's the big deal? It's just a collar.

It's only after they're around enough necks that people start getting zapped for modifying the OS, but even then some people will say, it's for your own good, why are you defending "hackers"?

Then people start getting shocked for trying to compete with the incumbents or expressing unpopular opinions, but by that point every device without a collar is some kind of obscure Linux Phone with a high price and low specs.

Now you're at the point where all someone has to do is make a competitive device which is otherwise identical to the one they were going to make anyway but it doesn't come with a shock collar and ordinary people will want it because they're tired of getting screwed. But the same critics will show up to say that ordinary people don't care about that and point to the fact that they didn't when it was first being rolled out and nobody was getting electrocuted yet.

Society took away a lot of the free time enjoyed decades earlier. We're working harder and longer hours for less pay than we have in some 50 years.

I'd love to do stuff like this but am still looking for a job. Let alone one with proper work life balances.

Where did Fry's Electronics go? Where can I go an buy robot parts or even used tech parts?

Let's say I want to build a drone from scratch.

Have you heard of this thing called the internet?

Right? They're asking that question on a forum dedicated to the subject that has been around for nearly two decades. The entirety of Silicon Valley was born in people's garages. Not really sure where it's meant to come back from

The problem is that the 'developers' you are seeing today are not the same from the 90s that have that hacker mindset and curiosity.

Instead, it has been hijacked by those who have never opened a PC before or were never interested in the field to begin with and saw it as a VC vehicle get-rich-quick scheme infiltrated by tons of grifters.

Once the money dries up post-extraction then they (grifters) abandon the field to the true 'hackers' still in the field doing clever projects like this one.

To me, the difference is that "hackers" has become focused on software. The early days in SV they had to invent the hardware. Now, hardware is commodity, and it has a novel idea for a hardware hacker to make the news. The Zuck hacked his first iterations of what became Facebook together. Apps like Snapchat and what not are just software hacked together using the hardware in novel ways. Things like Flipper0 are interesting hardware from hackers. Some interesting things find their way to the crowd funding sites that ultimately die on the vine. Sites for 3D printing show there are still some mechanical hardware types that still tinker.

Overall, it just shows that the hacker ethos never went any where. It's just younger people being exposed and thinking it's something new.

Most "hackers" now are build to sell (i.e., micro-entrepreneurship), not build for intellectual curiosity.