Maybe not exactly under the radar, but when I was last doing professional EE/hardware/embedded work around the turn of the millennium, the software (EDA, compil

Maybe not exactly under the radar, but when I was last doing professional EE/hardware/embedded work around the turn of the millennium, the software (EDA, compilers, CAD) and hardware (instrumentation, evaluation boards, PCB fabrication) were all super expensive, to the extent that they weren't really accessible to non financially-independent bootstrappers. Sometime in the last two decades (and again, I'm probably super late to the party on this) it's become extremely affordable to dip one's toe into electronic hardware and embedded software. And not just at the "breadboarding something with an Arduino" level, but at the level of building small production runs of a product that people would actually pay money for. In a way it reminds me of the mid-2000s era of web technology, where over the course of a few years you went from "putting expensive servers in a data center" to "filling out a web form" in order to host an app in a reasonably high-availability environment. Or another way of looking at it, a lot of things that maybe you previously had to fund-raise for are now things you can bootstrap, and many things are cheap even by hobby standards. That means for a lot of projects (for technical folks) you don't need to convince anyone else that your idea has merit, you can just build it and find out.