Eighty niche projects that are obvious if you work in the domain — now traced through their makers (the people behind one project quietly built three more) and graded on the only test that matters for building: can you actually fab it?
New in this build: deep cuts found by tracing makers — NIRDuino (via the DIY-fNIRS circle), the omi pendant (via omiGlass), Brewster's nRF52 biosensing boards, FreeEEG128, SIDLOC (the Libre Space beacon that flew on Ariane 6), and XLeRobot. Hit ★ Gold Standard in the index to show only projects with downloadable BOM + Gerbers (or native KiCad/EAGLE).
Every entry clears four bars at once — each scored 1–5, summed into a composite out of 20 — and now carries a separate fab-completeness grade.
Lesser-known but credible. Insider gems score high; household names score low.
Maintained — verified via recent commits, releases, stock and community signals.
You can get it today: buy assembled, buy a kit/PCB, or build from published files.
Technically real — research-grade, foundational, or peer-reviewed beats toys.
Every project plotted by obscurity (x) against how actively maintained it is (y). Bubble size is composite alpha; color is the domain; a gold ring marks Gold-standard fab files. Sweet spot is the upper-right. Hover for detail, click a bubble to open the project, toggle domains in the legend.
All 80, sorted by composite alpha. Sort any column (try Fab), filter by domain, flip on ★ Gold Standard, or search. The via line shows the maker trail; the Fab badge links straight to the actual files. Honesty flags stay visible.
The base index was sourced across neurotech/BCI, CAD & AI design, smart glasses and wearables, plus adjacencies (lab & bio, RF/SDR, robotics, prosthetics) and the registries where open hardware is catalogued. This build adds maker-tracing: for the makers, orgs, labs and communities behind those projects, we hunted their other, harder-to-find hardware — the kind you only reach by knowing who made what. Each traced entry shows a via provenance line, and each was checked for live signals (commits, releases, stock) — most within the last 18 months.
Two scores. Composite alpha (out of 20) sums obscurity, alive, buildable and legit — an editorial ranking, not a measurement. Fab-completeness grades whether you can actually fabricate the thing: Gold means an openly downloadable BOM plus Gerbers or native ECAD source (KiCad/EAGLE), or for mechanical builds editable CAD/STEP plus a BOM; Partial means some files are missing; N/A marks software, SDKs, journals and marketplaces that have no fab files to publish. Every fab grade links to the actual files so it stays checkable; closed-source, discontinued, stale-repo and non-commercial-license caveats are flagged rather than hidden.