I spend dozens and dozens of unpaid hours a month in my free time developing open source hardware and software and give the schematics away for free. That dedicated enough for you? You have no idea what goes on in the personal lives of each and every member of a forum, and you're painting us all with a broad brush right now.
I encourage others to reply to this comment on what it is they contribute to their cause. Because I'd be interested to hear that. On the Internet, we're just words on a screen that are easily categorized onto groups of people. But people are individuals, everybody has a story.
I have a completed project up on my Tindie page in my profile, it's an ESP32 based input/output control board powered by PoE that was designed for ESPHome software.
Lately I've been working on a fully featured modern MP3 player with tiny OLED screen and a PCB the size of a credit card. I've been frustrated with every project on the web that has anything to do with playing MP3s, they all kinda suck and most don't go beyond the "hello world" equivalent of playing an MP3 file. So I'm making sort of a "core" base firmware that will include all the basics, like browsing for a file to play, creating/editing playlists, non-blocking interrupt driven playback, internet streaming, and an alarm clock. Others would then be able to extend the functionally of this core system by just directly using its documented libraries and classes. It's all based around an ESP8266 and the VS1053 decoder chip.
Uh no, if I'm looking up how to troubleshoot an issue with my computer's motherboard, I don't want to be told to slather it in banana pudding just because I like bananas. There ARE things where you can't "bias" your way out of it, things that are objectively correct and incorrect.
Are you a microwave? (lemmy.world)
Cause friendships never end! (lemmy.ml)
If the internet has taught me anything it's that no one is an expert in anything (lemmy.world)