Looking for something new to dive into. What are the next Big Things™?
Subjective enthusiasm welcome!
Computational photography[1] is getting really, really cheap. You can do things with arrays of cameras, like see through shrubbery.[2]
Add in cheap controlled motion (think $200 CNC engraver machines) and you can build a comparator[3] to do precision measurements that used to require expensive machines.
[1] https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/
[2] https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/videos/crowd0-s...
[3] https://www.instructables.com/Comparatron-an-Affordable-Digi...
Software defined radio is great stuff. I've been helping a friend on the other side of the technology curve, he's been repairing things since the 1950s, and we've done a ton of Tube and early transistor stuff... 100 pound boat anchors can be replaced with functionally superior boxes the size of a large USB stick.
GNU radio is open source, and will work with your audio ports... so you can shift audio up/down in frequency, make a sonar, etc... all for free, and in your spare time. Add in a $30 RLTSDR dongle, and you can receive almost anything.
I bought a KrakenSDR for remote RF triangulation and it is wild what a few hundred dollars can do with SDR.
ASIC fabrication is being democratized... I look forward to getting a chip through TinyTapeout in 2025. I've had a long term itch to build a different type of compute engine... and now I get my chance for $150 and a lot of time. 8)
Neurotechnology for people with disabilities
artificial life