PCR is literally the lowest hanging fruit. It is a glorified rice cooker. There are many bigger open hardware problems to tackle in biology such as sequencing,

PCR is literally the lowest hanging fruit. It is a glorified rice cooker. There are many bigger open hardware problems to tackle in biology such as sequencing, anything optics related, and general process automation. It is not good for hardware and software people entering the field to get distracted with making PCR machines. To put it in context, take for example web collaborative software. They are very hard to build correctly and get right so most collaborative software in general are close sourced SaaSes. Imagine if a bunch of native/desktop software engineers decided to take a look at the problem and suggest that, hey, we need more open source real time collaborative software so let's build yet another web framework. Another web framework isn't needed and doesn't solve the problem! The problem is lack of correct CRDT and operational transform libraries. We don't need yet another web framework. I hope this analogy makes sense because everytime a biology thread comes up on HN the discussion pivots to "how can I help by focusing on x y z bioinformatics etc" and completely misses the point. Hard problems sometimes need to be tackled head on. Leave low hanging fruits to academia and interns. If you are a software/hardware engineer with >5 years of experience then recreating the Todo MVC equivalent in biomedical engineering isn't helping anyone. Many of the bio posts here feels like those low effort and inaccurate web dev tutorials on medium.com written by bootcamp grads that would never make it to the front of HN, but for some reason the people here are happy to swallow the equivalent in life science hook, line, and sinker.