What Cyberdemon said.
Between my job and being a member of a large, local, hacker/artist/creative space, I’ve easily watched this revolution happen.
These days I’m almost not impressed when I look at Sparkfun, Adafruit or similar website and see the a 9 axis, 3 environmental sensor, intergrated IoT & SoC with Pokemon detector chip, on a breakout board for $15. $20 if you want the version that formats the data into I2C, SPI and Morse code formats, that’s fairly easily integrated via Arduino programming.
I have a number of 6 month old breakout boards that were planned to be in costume, phone/network connected and other projects, that I guarantee you that I can now find faster, lower power consumption, smaller, easier to interface/program version for a couple dollars less.
Also with the explosion of related online user groups(3.0?), it’s fairly easy to find info on how to, or someone that has, created something similar to what you are looking to do.
I bet you could find someone that has created a drinking straw that cools your drink to the temperature in Reykjavik if you wanted.
These days its the application of the technologies that I find more interesting, curious, frustrating and funny. I’m also watching how this all effects ‘local’ based manufacturing, mostly on a small/med scale. Again the increasingly easier access to tech is allowing more fabrication shops of one sort or another to be attempted. Although well set-up now, take Shapeways for example.
At the same time I often think about the “landfill” issue. More so when thinking about the ever increasing available 3D printer technology. But that is a topic for another post.
-Peter