[ohazi]

I'm do hardware/firmware/embedded engineering professionally, but I also like to tinker and follow the electronics hobbyist community for fun (stuff on hackaday and "electronics twitter" is usually more interesting than stuff on eetimes).

The three biggest categories that I see are:

1. Toys/novelties (i.e. blinking/flashing things, simple robots, audio/music gadgets, etc.)

2. IoT stuff (e.g. some appliance that I have does some stupid/annoying thing, and I just want to build a one-off gadget to work around it; I don't trust cloud IoT devices and want to build my own; etc.)

3. Specialized hobby things (e.g. I have a hobby shop metal lathe and want to build an electronic leadscrew for it (https://github.com/clough42/electronic-leadscrew), DIY radio-control airplanes, drones, autopilots, etc.)

It's generally a lot harder to "solve a problem" with DIY electronics and then sell it as a useful product with broad appeal, like you often see in Silicon Valley with apps and SaaS webapps. Going from small prototype runs to any sort of mass production can be surprisingly difficult. There are often large step costs with their own engineering intricacies (e.g. 3d printed enclosure --> injection molded enclosure). Regulatory compliance (FCC, CE, UL, etc.) is a soul-destroying pain in the ass. Etc.