The most persuasive electrowetting grid technology would show you a video of the device running for hours without error. Of course all the demo videos you see

The most persuasive electrowetting grid technology would show you a video of the device running for hours without error. Of course all the demo videos you see show mere minutes of content because the underlying problem with these is their fault rate. They will incorrectly not push a drop when they were instructed to do so, which is irrecoverable by itself. That means nearly all experiments run on these grid platforms fail. So you need a separate system, like a camera, to detect a fault, and have a recovery procedure, for every step of the experiment. Which as you see, these things operate at the level of "assembly instructions" not high level programming, so you wind up with recovery procedures longer than the experiment itself. A recovery that itself may fault. What is the concrete scientific problem? My understanding is, there's science to do around the formula and application of the coating between the liquid and the electric grid. Commercial electrowetting systems, which of course exist and don't have the problems of amateur ones, use solvents other than water, so they interact with some coatings much more reliably. On the flip side, 1 minute of video is all you need to raise money. There's several seed stage companies, maybe even invested in by Y Combinator, that sort of scammed their investors with electrowetting. And it's of course not just electrowetting, the microbiome and vegan foods communities are big culprits. This is a common failure pattern, transferring academy-refined 1 minute videos into venture dollars, which is really the worst path because you are definitely not going to do the science you need with venture backing if you didn't do it in the academy. But venture investing is so memetic that 1 minute demos, tweet-sized due diligence and $40m raised for marketing instead of scientific research is definitely here to stay. These are profitable adaptations, no hot take is going to change that. Rather venture capital as an institution isn't credibly doing any science, that the people running these seed fund shows are really kind of stupid, and that we really ought to stop cutting their tax bills.