Ask Lemmy

Alright I can answer this because with all the shit there have also been a ton of cool tech that isn't fascist, and ton of instances of the community building something awesome:

**Commercial things: **

• Sodium Batteries (I have a 18650 shipment on the way for my custom charger)

• Solar panels have dropped in price so dramatically that they are viable for hundreds of millions of people

• Prusa and Bambu have made 3d printing not just a hobby, but very functional and practical. Now people themselves can replace broken parts, create new functional parts and tools without having to make their entire hobby and personality trying to fix and optimize their 3D printer

• MCUs have blasted off the past 10 years. nRF has revolutionized the Bluetooth space with nRF52 and newer. ESP has brought WiFi to literally everyone in any device they want with whatever processor strength with no antenna design. STM is very friendly to hobbyists and has everything for motors, and NXP makes performance beasts (and all non-US companies doing the great things of course) and they have all become so much more dramatically efficient.

• Multiple MCU companies have switched to open source toolchains that are inter-compatible, more portable, and transparent, making embedded development much less relying on shitty half-baked manufacturer libraries that are incomplete for different offerings.

• FOC motor control and bringing it to the masses have created a huge step in motors and have made implementing efficient servos actually viable for open source projects

• RLCD is an up and comer that gives epaper-like reduced eye strain and outdoor visibility while having an update rate of an LCD.

Maybe older, but still great:

• open source hardware companies like adafruit, sparkfun, olimex, etc... Have made electronics so much more accessible to actually do useful things with.

• epaper displays being widely available for power savings in small devices

**Community Projects: **

• HomeAssistant has gone from an enthusiast system 10 years ago, to literally the best, and easily customizable automation system that supports every

• Meshtastic and Meshcore bringing community location services and communication to everyone for a very cheap price

• Docker and Podman. They have revolutionized the server space.

• The leaps and bounds made in self hosting software in general is incredible and taken self hosting from a quite risky and very very complicated technical endeavor to do safely to a medium difficulty hobby project that is 100x less of a time sink. Not only that, but commercial software has genuinely good replacements Traefik/caddt, crowdsec, docker, immich, paperless-ngx, jellyfin, mealie, syncthing, nextcloud/opencloud, *arr suite, etc...

• The fediverse, still in early stages, but I don't need to explain the impact

• Gadgetbridge, turning smart wearables spying on you and selling your biometric data to insurance companies to just plain useful local devices for looking after yourself

There is more, but this is already long