Personally, I don't have much interest in doing anything DIY if I can just buy something inexpensively that does the same job at least as well as whatever I'd b

Personally, I don't have much interest in doing anything DIY if I can just buy something inexpensively that does the same job at least as well as whatever I'd build. If I'm going to build something, I want it to be unique somehow: to do that job better than the off-the-shelf solution, or add a useful feature I can't get by buying, for instance. I don't know enough about the subject of this particular article to say if this is the case here, but personally I think doing something that's a poorer version of a cheaper off-the-shelf solution is a bit of a waste of time, but if they're doing something different, that's really interesting to me.